On Oct 5, 2009, at 8:34 PM, Benjamin Franz wrote:
Robert Heller wrote:
Right. You'll *have* to get at least a socket-7 motherboard with a K6 processor and DIMM RAM sockets and PCI bus, if only because getting old-school SIMMs is hard these days. And getting a distro with install kernels (much less stock kernels) for less than a 586 is getting hard, unless you opt for something like Slackware or Linux From Scratch. In practice any still working minimually i686 system with a reasonable amount of RAM (for just a DNS server, 256meg RAM and a 20-40 GIG IDE disk, would probably even be enough to install, say, CentOS). I recently installed CentOS 5.2 on a old Dell box (PII or PIII vintage) with an 18gig disk. No X11. Just DNS, DHCPD, PPPD, Samba, CUPS, and little else. This little box is just being used as a dialup 'router'. It is jacked into a wireless 'router', but the wireless router is just being used as an accesspoint and Ethernet switch (this is a home setup -- broadband is not presently available, only dialup internet).
I replaced a modern retail firewall/router with a 500 Mhz Celeron with 512K RAM (Intel 810e motherboard) and a PCI dual port ethernet card of because the 'modern' POS turnkey couldn't handle 100 mbits/second through the WAN interface. The 500Mhz celeron with CentOS5 handled that plus DNS and DHCP without ever cracking 1% CPU usage.
That proves 614K should be enough for anybody.
Giovanni P. Tirloni tirloni@gmail.com