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Putting Older Hardware To Good Use?

Posted by Cliff on from the finding-parts-and-software-for-forgotten-hardware dept.

^Phantom asks: "I am a telecommunications major at college. Due to the lack of lab time at school I am always trying to practice as much at home as possible, the problem is I don't have the money for the latest/greatest things, usually I end up with scraps that 'helpful' friends and co-workers come up with. A common example is the Motorola Powerstacks I have on my floor now. I would like to put these to use, and I have heard linux can be made to run on them, but I have been unable to find info except message threads stating the problems that others have faced but with no solutions. I did find one HOWTO but when I followed the steps listed I ended up with a box that kernel panics on boot and no idea why. Is there any websites dedicated to putting old/odd hardware such as this to use?" You'd be amazed how many people out there are finding yesterday's powerful machines in a surplus sale and would love to figure out where to find hardware for it, or figuring out what OSes it will run. Are there any resources on the interenet that might help one with obtaining this information?

13 comments

  1. Xterms by edwazere · · Score: 2

    I'm not sure if this is really relevant - but (once you've got linux/***bsd running on old hardware it seems to make sense to run them as Xterms.

    I've been involved in a project where we are using a number of low end pentium's without much ram as Xterms to a more powerful machine with a bucketload of ram running StarOffice and displaying on each of these old machines.

    It seems to work well at the moment, we are still in the testing stage, but it looks like the management of the machines will be much easier than the current Windows systems elsewhere in the school.

    As an aside, does anyone know of the best way of cloning the disks to other machines - they are all identical except for the size of the disks - will DD work? or will the disk geometry screw it up?
    (I don't mind taking all the disks out and putting them in one machine one at a time if that's the easiest.)

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    -- You ain't seen me, right?
    1. Re:Xterms by wbmccrea · · Score: 1

      For cloning disks, I normally use a boot disk (with Samba/NFS compiled in the kernel, as appropriate), then use tar (if you are setting up a bunch of machines at the same time, this seems to be verry fast, as long as you can start the untar process on all the machines at basically the same time so that all the clients are asking for the same portion of the tar file while the server has that part in cache)

    2. Re:Xterms by Stavr0 · · Score: 2

      Norton Ghost if you don't mind closed source paid software. It's got many modes of operation. My preferred way is MS-Networking-on-a-boot-floppy reading an image off a SMB share, but it also has a TCP/IP multicast client/server mode as well as regular partition-to-partition copying.
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    3. Re:Xterms by edwazere · · Score: 1

      So I just use tar and get everything from / recursing directories?

      And I assume I would need to install the bootloader manually?

      Sorry if this is'nt the correct place to discuss this.

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      -- You ain't seen me, right?
    4. Re:Xterms by cblack · · Score: 2

      I would use systemimager to install a full linux image on the machines. I use it for our cluster and it works great.
      www.systemimager.org

      It us understandable to be surly sometimes.

    5. Re:Xterms by technos · · Score: 2

      You can do every thing Ghost does with nfs, dd and cp.. Shit, even SMB and NT on the backend.. The only real problem is the initial images, which require patience when being stuffed over the network.

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      .sig: Now legally binding!
    6. Re:Xterms by ameoba · · Score: 1

      There's another package called Cluclo out there... You can find it (and probably a few others) of freshmeat.

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      my sig's at the bottom of the page.
    7. Re:Xterms by wbmccrea · · Score: 1

      I normally image win9x machines this way, but I don't see why it wouldn't work for linux...

      After building the first machine the way that I want it, I basically create a tarball of everything (except /proc, etc.). Then you just have to boot the client machine up, partition / format the HDD, then connect to your server, and uncompress the tarball. For linux, I'd assume that you would need to run lilo manually or make a sh script that does everything. ie. the mount command, the format, the tar -zxvvspf, then I'd just finish the script off with the lilo command (something like: `/mnt/sbin/lilo -C /mnt/etc/lilo.conf -r /mnt`)

  2. The problem... by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 1
    The problem is a lot of instruction on the net isn't that great. Every piece of old hardware will probably come with a whole different set of issues for getting it working. For example I bought an old Toshiba laptop and hunted down instructions for it. I found a set of instructions for setting Linux up on the EXACT model I had and they were pathetic. While I appreciate the work people put in to writing about it, the attitude of a lot seems to be "it worked for me, if it doesn't work for you well you obviously did something wrong."

    Best thing I can suggest would be to head too Google and do what I do. I enter the hardware name and model number as accurately as possible, add the word "linux" and see what comes up. I did eventually find good instructions for getting my laptop working courtesy of a cached message board post on Google, whereas the Linux Documentation Project and other resources were next to useless.

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    1. Re:The problem... by acroyear · · Score: 2

      Another problem with 'net documentation (the infamous "HOW-TO" pages and websites) is the age. A lot of the how-to and mini-howto pages are still meant for older (pre 2.2, much less 2.4) versions of linux; some involve kernel configuration/rebuilding (like the iomega zip howto) that you don't need to do for more recent/up-to-date kernels (zip support is standard in most distribution's binary kernels). Others involve applying patches that were written for the 2.0/2.1 trees, and have no place in the current kernel to be applied.

      --
      "But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
      -- Joe
    2. Re:The problem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Also, cross your fingers until Google gets the old Deja archive back up. Seeing what people had to say about your old hardware when it was new is often invaluable (even though they are hacking on Linux 1.0 or something).

  3. Re:PowerStack II by UnifiedTechs · · Score: 1

    That is the install I tried, following I believe the same instructions you found, this leads me to the kernel panic on boot, I've tried booting by both Floppy and HDD. What version of debian are you using? Maybe thats my problem.

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    iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
  4. resources on the web by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Here are some of my favs. These are kinda current ie. pentiumish stuff. Trish's hardwarehell http://hardwarehell.com/ good collection, MotherBoards is great for newer stuff http://www.motherboards.org/ This place has tips and stuff back to '96 http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/index.html For the nitty gritty I use questlink for chip numbers and specs, great for figuring out what the hell kind of memory you found under the couch http://www.questlink.com/