Spare PC?

[Howard]

What can I use an old spare PC for, besides:

Folding
Web server
FTP server
DHCP/DNS
Firewall
HTPC


?


It's not very powerful, something like 3 or 400 MHZ with about 64MB ram. I might be getting hold of it sometime this week

[skuzgib]

Footrest?

[Zak33]

Music Storage.

simple as that. A hard drive with nothing but music and yu can experiment to your hearts content withnew players, free downloads and stuff like that with no worry that it might slow your PC registry down, cos if its just for music, it doesnt matter.

Music

mind you ...it will be the BIGGEST MP3 PLAYER IN THE WORLD not exactly pocket sized

[iMc]

Best to just use it as a home server. Stick a jumbo HDD in there and you never have to clutter your PC up with vids, music etc.

[Howard]

Hmm... Possibly. I've got a lot of music though. Doubt it's HDD is very big. I don't like the idea of file storage much either. Prefer to have it all on my PC for simple access

I can never think of uses of stuff when I try

I wanna run something on it and put it in the loft/garage permanently and just VNC into it. But I can't tthink of anything that isn't already running on my server.

Could give Linux a go I guess. But it looks rather complicated.

[mike_w]

Give Linux a go, that's what's on my spare PC at the moment. I wouldn't bother with 'easy' distros like Mandrake - just go for Debian using directhex's great guide!

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD03OTI=
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD03OTM=
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD04MjQ=

[Norky]

Gomez Peer!

[RDL]

You could use it as an IRC server, so that you can have 100% stable 24/7 irc. Or you could use it for a print server.

[Howard]

What's Gomez?

And how do I set up an IRC server?

[Norky]

You could use it as an IRC server, so that you can have 100% stable 24/7 irc. Or you could use it for a print server.

....and become the target of 1000's of script kiddies everywhere....

Gomez Peer is like all those SETI distributed calculation programs, except you get payed for using it. It is used to find bottlenecks in the internet. It may sound dodgy, but you do get payed, I've got $21 in my paypal account from it, and it uses little to no CPU so you can just run it in the background and forget about it. If you're interested you can get it here.

[aidanjt]

Howard, you would need to get into Linux to have a decent IRC server, theres a few IRCds to choose from, most of the configuration files are based on the origional IRCd, so they will all allow you to restrict access.

Linux is hard at first, is a huge break from windows, the virtual file system was a bit confusing for me at first, but you get used to it just like any system. But its good to learn and know