So if you read my previous post I was gutting my old HP Pavillion Pentium II Tower. Yes it’s an old box from 1998. In the spirit of being “green” I decided to recycle this machine by repurposing rather than throwing it away. So I finally decided how to use it.
I dusted everything out and reinstalled the motherboard, PSU and memory. I also had to take an old but more recent Ethernet card from another PC and install it because in 1998…dial up was the thing. I installed a 60GB HDD with Ubuntu 9.04 as the operating system.
I decided to use this machine to host the proxy, web content filter and apache web server. I have my son’s computer configured to use the proxy and web content filter. I developed an internal website..just intranet..for my home.
Here is the break down of the software I installed and have running on the old Pentium II..and they run flawlessly and smooth.
- Xampp for LINUX (LAMPP)- http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html
- OpenSSH Server (LINUX) – http://www.openssh.com/portable.html , http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howot-install-ubuntu-linux-ssh-server.html
- Firestarter (IPTables, Firewall)- http://www.fs-security.com/
- TinyProxy & Dansguardian – http://www.instructables.com/id/Set_up_web_content_filtering_in_4_steps_with_Ubunt/
- Joomla CMS – http://www.joomla.org/
This machine has no monitor but I have setup the SSH on the rest of my other PC’s so I can connect using the terminal (command line) when needed. If I wanted to I can also connect through Remote Desktop.
So my conclusion is that I was able to reuse this old computer even though its not as cool as newer computers today. This prevents from having to throw it away and introduce more bad products into the environment. Using it as a simple webserver/proxy it runs with no problem and surprisingly not very slow either.
[...] are outdated but as far as the PC in general goes.. why not repurpose it for another function. Check out my blog (link in signature). Even if you decide against using it in the vehicle you can maybe repurpose as [...]
[...] sites such as pbskids.org or edheads.org. On one of my earlier blog posts I described how I re-purposed an old Pentium II into a webserver which is running LINUX distro UBUNTU Jaunty. I am also using this old PC as a proxy [...]