On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 05:54:29PM +0100, Christoph Biedl wrote: > Certainly, with some limits though. At some point new hardware is that > much more energy efficient the inital cost pays off over the intended > time of usage. Want my old P4 server?
That P4 server can drive a bunch of disks and serve as an adequate backup/etc endpoint. You don't need a big CPU or gobs of memory for that task, its CPU will stay mostly idle too. And more importantly, it can run regular current amd64 Debian. Heck, I run 15 vservers on mine and I see no performance needs it doesn't meet. Obviously, I'm not insane enough to try to run compiles, etc -- I got actual modern machines for that, there's just no need to upgrade this one. Once you go down from 3GB memory that P4 in my cellar has to 128MB your armel box is limited to, the number of uses gets sharply limited. Even simple "apt update" takes ages. As it takes $20-30 to buy an armhf or arm64 SoC with 2GB memory and a CPU that runs circles around both our machines, it's no longer cost effective to try to keep that old armel thing running -- I'm speaking about human effort not the negligible monetary cost. Meow! -- u-boot problems can be solved with the help of your old SCSI manuals, the parts that deal with goat termination. You need a black-handled knife, and an appropriate set of candles (number and color matters). Or was it a silver-handled knife? Crap, need to look that up.
