Having said that though, personally, I would use the PII as the firewall,
backup, file server etc etc. The new fast machine as the family desktop and
ditch the other two.
Using the same machine as a backup file server and a firewall seems a
little foolhardy to me, especially given that there are spare machines to
play with.
A fortnight ago my landlady went out into the garage and found that the
breaker had gone several days before and all the food in her freezer had
gone, including her prize winning rowanberries - boohoo! Made me jump up
and start trying to figure out a method for an alarm light to come on in
the house whenever garage power was off. Now that's fairly simple to do
and doesn't need a computer, but there are a huge number of related things
that you could do and you could sensibly put an ancient machine at the
heart of that. The older the better even, because it will draw less power
when left on for long periods of time. My pap used to have a set of
lights programmed to change in a random way and he kept an ancient box
running for many years doing little other than that. Light up,
gradually dim, switch off, the whole lot. Classic anti-burglar mechanism
jazzed up to make it plausible day after day.
Regards, Max
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