Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > Hello, > > I've got a 486DX4-100 with 32 MB ram, ISA bus, with two drives: 840 MB > and 1280 MB IDE. Currently running Debian GNU/Linux Sarge. > > Box has two uses: > > under normal cirumstance, as a thin client to my > athlon box elsewhere in the house. > > As a toolbox incase anything goes wrong with my new athlon, I > still can dial out to the net for help and downloads. > > Debian Etch will need more than 32 MB ram so am starting the planning. > > I've compared Open-, Net-, and Free-BSD (via google search and reading > the three web-sites) and like the security-by-default nature of Open- > and its reputation for solid documentation. I'm used to the command > line (hate GUI) and vi. > > Is there any reason that OpenBSD wouldn't be my best choice for this > box? > > Thanks, > > Doug.
Don't know about "best", but it should work as well as anything, and probably better than most. Install will take a while, ssh logins will be painful (ssh1 and/or reducing your key size will help a lot), Oh, and read up on SSH connection sharing (-M). It Rocks for slow machines! Make sure you get your ISA NIC set right, and you should be in fine shape... Both of those HDs are old and may not be long for the world, so pick one, and install on it, leave the other one alone, or as a backup, not as part of a production system. That will somewhat reduce the likelihood of a disk failure taking you down. Since you don't have the disk space, if you don't have a faster machine to build on, you might want to stick to running -current, so if a security problem shows up, just install the latest snapshot, you will be done before the -stable users get done asking if they really have to build everything, or if they can build "just the parts that are impacted". Yes, there's a lot more adventure involved in that, but that's an unpleasantly small amount of machine to build on... Hm. time to test build on a 486 again...haven't done that in a while. Took about a week, if I recall properly (I cheat, I got 64M and a 20G disk in mine!) Nick.
