Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

I’m a staunch supporter of putting old, but working, computers to good use again. Personally, I have repurposed numerous systems back into production after they were deemed to be too old, and replaced with newer hardware. One of my favourite tools for enabling this is NetBSD. As described on the NetBSD Web site, “NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from large-scale server systems to powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.”

At the pub last night, a friend of mine who also does some IT work was telling me of how he rescued three old 200 MHz PCs with the help of NetBSD. He works for a Web site operator, and part of their operations involve serving copious amounts of images. So he installed NetBSD on those systems, and ran some stress tests over night. The next morning he set up Lighttpd, and within a couple of hours they’d been integrated into the network and were serving images.

He was sort of surprised that they were able to handle the load so well. But it’s really not all that surprising. A typical PC with a 200 MHz x86 CPU is actually quite powerful. And for a task like serving images, it is more than suitable. Using efficient and effective software like NetBSD and Lighttpd makes it ever more useful.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Hardware, NetBSD, Software, Web Development, Web Sites. 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.