[Gllug] Uses for old computers

[John Edwards]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 05:31:45PM +0000, NorthLondon John wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There's recently been a message on Freecycle London asking what can be 
> done with "electronic waste" - "a bunch of old pre-pentium computers, 
> monitors and printer"
> 
> Two questions:
> 1: can pre-pentium computers be put to any good/fun/interesting use?

Firewalls - either use modem on a serial port or a extra ISA ethernet 
card for ADSL or cable. A good BSD or Linux firewall will be more 
secure than a Windows software firewall.

DNS/DHCP server for a local network.

Single use consoles - an example being to boot up a telnet program 
that only connects to a particular server. 

I think an X terminal would be too much for older machines as they 
tend to have low RAM and poor graphics cards.

Machines with a 386 CPUs, or with less than 16MB RAM are going to 
be difficult to use with Linux. 286 CPUs and earlier are not usable 
at all.


> 2: how can this stuff be disposed of safely and cleanly?

Depends what you mean by "cleanly".

My local council will recycle electrical goods for homes (not 
businesses), but I'm not sure how well.

Passing them onto a specialist IT recycler may be better as they
will be setup to test and refurbish them throughly.

There is a DTI paper on reusing old IT equipment:
	http://www.dti.gov.uk/support/good1.html


Don't forget to wipe the hard drives. Running dd three times over 
them with random input data is a simple way:
	dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

A floppy bootable distro like tomsrtbt can be used for systems that
don't boot CDs:
	http://www.toms.net/rb/


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|       John Edwards    Email: John.Edwards at uk.com        |
|                                                         |
| A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion |
| Q. Why is top posting bad ?                             |
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