views:

136

answers:

4

My former roommate agreed to host my web site for a while on his server while I got situated at my new apartment with my wife (also new). He is looking to move soon and wants to retire his web server, so I need to build a server for my own use.

I investigated setting up a virtual box on the Mac Mini that I use for development, but I can't really guarantee it will always be available, so I'd like to have hardware dedicated to serving up the site.

The old setup is LAMP, and I'm pretty comfortable in Linux, LAMP seems the way to go, but the spare hardware I have is OLD - 3/486, 32 or 64 meg of ram, with a HD somewhere between 8 and 16 gigs.

Due to setting up budget with my wife, however, new hardware is pretty much out.

What do you guys think? Can I get a LAMP setup running on hardware that old and constrained? Some of the pages leverage MySQL and Php, so it's not straight static HTML, but I'm not running Java or anything. Are there distros specially suited for this sort of setup?

+3  A: 

You could probably find a free machine orders of magnitude better than that one just by asking around.

CodeMonkey1
I agree. Keep in mind that Linux dropped 386 support some time ago and I'm not even sure if the latest Kernel supports 485 ('though I'd assume it does). That hardware is seriously OLD!
Joachim Sauer
Your DSL modem probably also got a faster CPU than this :-/
Joachim Sauer
I tried this, and surprisingly, it appears it might have worked.
Matt Poush
A: 

It will run on that hardware, sure, but it depends entirely on what kind of load the apps will put on it (lots of complex db access for instance), and also how many hits it will get.

If it's just something for you to play around with and test things then it will work just fine, although you can probably grab a PIII server for virtually nothing these days if you want something a bit beefier.

Steven Robbins
+1  A: 

Just a tip, but from personal experience I've found that FreeBSD works much better on low-end hardware than a modern Linux distro does.

Kyle Cronin
Wouldn't NetBSD be the BSD of choice here? It runs on pretty much anything, so I'd assume it can get by with limited resources.
Joachim Sauer
Sure, NetBSD works too, but FreeBSD makes installing software like Apache, PHP, and MySQL easy with the ports system.
Kyle Cronin
A: 

I would just like to point out that 8 or 16 gb hdd's were not so common in the time of the 386's. More like 100-500mb range. Same goes for RAM. Other than that, I agree with others - better configuration could probably be found at a dumpster these days. This is seriously old.

ldigas