[CentOS] How fast?

Mon Oct 5 23:34:53 UTC 2009
Benjamin Franz <jfranz at freerun.com>

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.

-- 
Benjamin Franz