[SWLUG] Looking for some old hardware.

[Steve Anderson]

Dominic Pearson wrote:

> I'm looking for some old hardware to use as a dedicated machine for the
> Asterisk PBX system. Does anyone have any old machines they'd sell? Or does
> anyone know where I can get some old hardware cheaply? I've tried places
> like EBay, but most of the stuff there is either way too expensive or just
> not suitable (An old PII machine with 64mb RAM should be plenty).

I have an old PII machine, but not much to plug into it. All my spare 
parts got fried thanks to a power spike taking out my Dad's old PC 
(which I didn't realise was damaged beyond repair until it killed 
everything else). Otherwise I could've passed some stuff on (this PII is 
destined to be an office jukebox).

> If I can't get hold of any suitable old hardware, I'd maybe think of building
> a nice el-cheapo box (I'm on a budget of around 100 quid, so it'd have to be
> something *really* cheap.) Has anyone got any suggestions of where I can get
> parts to build a workable system that cheaply?

I built my Linux box for £125, or thereabouts. The motherboard is a PC 
Chips jobby from eBuyer, and has onboard graphics, sound, LAN and a 
733MHz VIA C3, all ready to go, for about £25 I think. Sadly I can't 
find the boards on their website any more - I wanted to build a budget 
cluster! Most expensive part was the hard drive at £60. £25 for the RAM 
off a mate and a cheap and nasty case for £15. CD-ROM and floppy were 
lying around the house already... So it can be done =)

eBuyer are worth a perusal, they tend to have some nice stuff lurking 
around for cheap.

If you fancied splashing out a little more, I've just built a Mini-ITX 
media PC for £200. You could knock a sizable chunk off that by not 
needing a Nehemiah cored multimedia capable one, less memory and smaller 
drive, I'm sure. Have a look at http://www.icp-epia.co.uk.

Steve