Linked by Richard White on Tue 15th Mar 2005 11:21 UTC
My basement is like a mortuary with the remains of computers all lying in state, waiting and hoping for a new lease on life. But what is there to do with the K6s, the Celerons, and Pentiums of the past. It seems nothing short of a miracle would bring these ghosts back to life.
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I have here a Pentium III 500MHz. that I stacked to its max with RAM (holding 768MB now) and a 250MB hard drive. Out of pure academic interest I installed Debian with Xen on it just a few days ago. I now have a complete virtual network with lots of services running on dedicated "machines". It does DNS, LDAP authentication, mail, web serving with the Typo3 CMS, MySQL and FTP all in separate virtual machines. And wouldn't you know: it's still FAST!! The added benefit is simple management. No longer do I have to manage a whole load of services on a single OS instance. It's also very secure. Once someone breaks into Bind or Apache, they can just sit and stare at my bare web server while my files and MySQL databases are relatively safely stored elsewhere even though they're on the same physical machine.
The virtual machines can also be migrated off this hardware quite easily if they need more performance. I'm really impressed with the capabilities of Xen, even on relatively ancient hardware!
Indeed I agree with the previous posters that RAM is key in using old hardware. Luckily it's none too expensive to stuff a PIII with PC100/PC133 RAM.