Re: [seul-edu] Slowest Computers Useful For

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@reedmedia.net>]

On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Les Richardson wrote:

> 2) Firewall Routing - I'm using 386-40's for dialup routing and firewalls.
> For a faster connection like 384K and up DSL I would suggest something in
> the Pentium/486 100 range. I've had no success with 486-66's doing DSL
> routing, but YMMV. My firewall at home is a 486-100 managing a 128K/1.5Mb
> DSL link.

I successfully use 486-66's for routing 128k/768k DSL connections.

> 3) Server usage - We are using a 486-66 for a school division mail server
> (and have for 4 years) doing only POP/SMTP. Other servers for file/print
> service are Pentium 200's with 128MB of RAM but good SCSI drives ( 2 x
> 18GB Seagate UW Barracuda 7200's).

For several years I have successfully used old 486-66's to run apache
webservers (tens of thousands of hits daily), Samba, LPD, ftp servers,
mail servers, etc.

Just last week I did some tests, and an old 486-100 laptop running Apache
could serve 386,000 15k static webpages per day over a 128kb (only
used 89kb out) connection. This was with 18 Apache processes and the load
was around 1.07.

I have often found that the reliability and performance of old 486-66
systems (which have uptimes of 100 to 200 days) to be just as or more
valuable as the variety of US$7000+ servers I use. (Of course, they are
too slow for compiling!)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/