The original attraction of Linux was the way it makes obsolete hardware into a lean, mean server. In keeping with that grand tradition, I convinced my father-in-law to give me two old 386's which he was replacing for the Y2K. Very traditional, right? Instant free firewall, right? You decide:
The two computers added up to one computer. One had a blown disk controller on the motherboard; the other had a bad hard disk. One case, and other miscellaneous parts, went into a box labelled "junk", which I still can't bear to throw out.
The motherboards required 30-pin memory chips. Great! My sysadmin at work was happy to give me a sackful of 4MB, 30-pin SIMMs. But wait! Both motherboards detected only the first 1M of memory on each SIMM, for a total of 8 megabytes of RAM. Just barely acceptable, but a real shame. (The motherboard which went into the junk box couldn't detect more than 4MB of memory, no matter how it was distributed.)
Of course, these ancient machines refuse to boot without a keyboard. The computer looks mighty silly with nothing attached but a keyboard, jammed against the wall behind the computer. Plus, I needed to buy that keyboard for $10.00, as well as a ps/2-to-AT adapter for another $3.00.
The 120MB hard drives were in bad shape. One had to be discarded. My trusty sysadmin again came through, offering me a small box of 120MB drives. (All but one went into the junk box, since the motherboard only had one controller.) Sadly, RedHat hasn't fit into 120MB in about two years. Slackware might fit, and older Slackware versions certainly would, but I'm addicted to the easy installs of modern Linuxes. Solution: upgrade my desktop to 8GB (a $130.00 value), and steal the obsolete 1.6GB drive I was once so proud of.
But wait! Nothing I could do would convince the machine to boot a 1.6GB drive. The BIOS would always barf, with some sort of complaint about a "ridiculous disk". Nor would it recognize the big disk as a slave.
In a fit of anger, I went to the Goodwill Computer Store. (That's right! In Pittsburgh, the Goodwill has a separate store for computers and electronic junk.) There I found a 486DX motherboard and chip for about $20.00, and upgraded to that. Working without a manual, I still haven't figured out how to connect the PC speaker, turbo button, or lights--but at least it recognizes my hard drive now!
Now, remember that 8GB hard drive? While upgrading my desktop, the motherboard blew. For $100.00 I got a new motherboard, transferred my old P100 chip to it, and reinstalled. There was some compensation, though: the new motherboard included IRDA and USB ports, and on-board sound and video. This freed up my Sound Blaster and Number9 cards for another machine.
Okay, now I've got a slightly upgraded desktop, and a 486DX firewall box with no memory. That sack full of 30-pin SIMMs, of course, is now useless (add that to the junk box). Back online; my desktop is really crawling anyway. X-windows doesn't run on 8MB any more, and it really needs more than the 32MB I had. Maybe my CPU was under-powered at 100Mhz. So another $80.00 sets me up with a 128MB DIM, and frees up four 8MB SIMMs. Another bummer: the 486 will only recognize 16MB of RAM, so two of the SIMMs go into my growing box of junk.
That does it! Just switch the modem from the desktop to the new firewall, and we're good to go. We've got a 486DX with 16MB of RAM and 1.7GB of hard drive space, with a keyboard jammed behind it and no monitor.
So now I've got a free box to use as a firewall, and it only cost me $343.00. I'm sure glad I didn't blow five hundred dollars on a new computer, which would probably only have had 64MB of RAM, 10GB of hard drives, a 48X CD-ROM, and a Celeron processor running at 450 megasnorts or so!
