Uses for older hardware, RaQ2

[Jonathan Kinney]

I am trying to think of some good uses for some older hardware that I have. Back in the day, there were these servers called Cobalt RaQ2 servers, based on the MIPS processor. For a long time, they were being held back by two factors, first, the OS was quickly dated, and second, the speed and other hardware specs quickly became obsolete.

Recently I picked up a little Linksys WRT54GS 1.1 router, which is running a silly little 216 MHz cpu, with 8 megs of flash, and 32 megs of ram. I installed dd-wrt and turned that little piece of hardware into a very robust router that can run all kinds of things for me.

Now if that little low powered system can be useful, surely I could find a good use for a RaQ2, as now it can run the latest and greatest version of Debian. If it had 2 network ports, it would be a no brainer, it would become a nice little router, and then some, but it only has one interface. It has the full library of Debian software that it can run, but it only has 256 megs of ram and a 250 MHz MIPS CPU. Other than a file server of sorts, or a static website (or very slow dynamic one), I am short of ideas. It is very low power, and I could toss a solid state drive in it, and toss the fan, so it could be silent, and all that is very attractive.

Any ideas for this little fully functional, and fully slow old server? I am considering maybe even asterisk + FreePBX to support a few VOIP lines... :)

[Chicken]

Not sure if you remember from the ol' WHT days of yore, but I used to run a few RaQ's back in the day and liked those little buggers. I can't imagine why they wouldn't still be good as email , DNS, file servers, etc.

Ohh how I miss thee RaQ3 :cry: (not really, but...)

[visionguy]

you can use it for backup, email, dns , stats?

[SSANZ]

yeah you can use them for mail, dns etc.

Really insecure.

[OKIHost]

raqs were the servers I loved to hate :) First box was a raq3 with a 10gb drive and 256mb ram.. my how things have changed over the years..

[Dominic]

Raqs aaaaaah those where the days ... the blue warriers that made me real real REAL mad from time to time ... but i always survived and got them working :)

I had a Raq2 as well, after that came the Raq3 and Raq550's i had loads of them at a certain time ... i kept them for a long time after they where declared EOL by Sun.

Now i only have 3 left for fun :) (the irony :D)

[rackaid]

Boat anchor.

I had a client 2-3 years ago that grew so tired of his Raq that he put a hole in it and used it as an anchor. He said the satisfaction of knowing that the thing was resting on the bottom of the ocean was better than any computational use he could get out of it.

[ServerMojo]

Install squid or something like that and use it as a proxy/cache server or basic load balancer..