19-year-old Mac doing server duty with NetBSD ... plus even older Macs serving up Web pages
A Macintosh IIci -- with 25 MHz of CPU power -- equipped with NetBSD is currently serving up Web pages and somehow surviving.
If you want to turn your ancient Mac into a server, start here (to use Mac software and find out about other ancient Mac servers), or here (to use NetBSD).
And if a IIci is too new for you, here's an Apple ][e (circa 1984) Web server, and a Mac SE. And here's an Apple Lisa server. (Thanks to The Old Apple Web Server Directory).
I looked for a similar homage to old PCs as servers, but all I could find were endless reiterations of the old "Hey, if you have an old PC, why not turn it into a web/print/file server?" I didn't see any "Here's my 386SX-25 or 486-66 that serves up Web pages."
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I wish I could make my G5 1.8 work as well as any of my PC's. It is slow, noisy and, did I mention, slow.
I've been experimenting with Apache in OpenBSD. I'll be writing about it soon.
I ran a web server (it was some kind of compressed linux boot floppy thing) for a few days just to see if it could on a amd 386 (can't remember the speed) It had 4mb of ram if i remember corectly.
It ended up going to a friend to paly with, with openGEM and freeDOS on it.
Damn, and I only recently shut down my 486sx/25 that had been running RedHat Linux 4 and apache faithfully for years. I got tired of the noisy power supply fan, and amazingly loud disk drive, and also wanted to free up some space. Damn those old boxes where huge !
You probably won't find a web site showing old PCs being used as servers because it's been done for so long now that the novelty is gone.
Well, the older they get, the more novel it becomes, I imagine.