What should I do with this Old Optiplex? And what about that 400 MHz Scenic?

You can do alot with these old 400 MHz machines, so don’t throw them away! For example: You can use a old machine as a NAS with the free OS called “FreeNAS”, which is easily administered through a WebUI. It supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5), and Active Directory. The best thing is, that the OS only takes up 32 MB’s on your HDD or CF card, so you have plenty of space left for the Data the machine was set up for. Link: http://www.freenas.org

Hardware firewalls are more powerful than software firewalls, not only the Professionals say that. More and more home users have got interest in running a safe network to protect their very important data. A team has developed another OS, that runs very smooth on older machines. The only Extra you need, to run a Hardware Firewall, is a secondary NIC.

You install the Linux Distro called “IPCop”, and start configuring your new Firewall through your favorite Web browser on ANY remote machine in your network.

Link: http://www.ipcop.org

Give your old friend a new life as Server or Protector instead of throwing him into a landfill or sending him to India, where the old computer chips pollute the Atmosphere. It doesn’t cost you anything to Install the NAS software on the HDD, but it does cost you something to get that Buffalo TeraStation you always wanted. To be honest, the TeraStation looks prettier, but the inner values count, not the outer shell.

Of course there is more you can do with the old pile of scrap sitting in your storage room: Just Google “what to do with old computer” , and you will see, how you can enrich your network with the machines, you were going to bring to the Dump next week (I know that you were saying that last year already)….

What Ideas did you come up with? Please send me an E-Mail to computec@askcomputec.com , because the Comment feature is currently defective.  Im working on it. (Comments are fixed)

Tags: old computer machine firewall nas netowrk attached storage

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 12:07 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.