Ask HN: What to do with a spare computer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430636

by pierrefar • 18 years ago

22 46 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm about to get hold of a spare computer, and this thread from earlier today ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429573 ) prompts this question:

What are some cool/useful things to do with a spare computer?

I'm looking for interesting extra functionality I can add to the house.

Thanks!

speek• 18 years ago

Asterisk.

Samba share.

Pluto home (really nifty home automation + media server).

quellhorst• 18 years ago

Give it to someone who has an even older computer.

swilliams• 18 years ago

Honestly, this is the best solution. I've tried to resurrect old workstations as various servers and they have always ended up collecting dust in a closet somewhere.

The only one that's seen success is the media center that records television, and that's only because the capture card didn't have the right drivers for my current desktop.

The other most common uses I hear (servers to tinker with Technology X) can just be done in a VM, which will generate far less noise, heat, and power bills.

pierrefar2• 18 years ago

Given that this will be set up as a home server, I promise you the next spare one I have will be donated to a person in need.

That person will most likely be a broke student entrepreneur in dire need of more computing power.

vaksel• 18 years ago

gut it for parts, add the RAM and HD to your current computer.

Or put it in the kitchen for recipes etc.

pclark• 18 years ago

Boxee.

ericb• 18 years ago

Make it a mythtv box?

http://www.mythtv.org/

old-gregg• 18 years ago

Ohhh... I've done a lot of interesting things with old computers, including just shooting one with a shotgun, that particular bastard well deserved it though...

The coolest project I've done with an old box involved playing with power-on over ethernet. The box I've had was configured (using BIOS) to power up in the middle of the night, send "wake up" packets to other machines (they were turned off), wait for them to power on, incrementally backup up their entire hard drives and power off everything including itself. I would wake up in the morning with all computers powered off. That was fun to watch multiple machines waking up, buzzing their drives and turning off by themselves.

These days I never turn anything off though...

watmough• 18 years ago

What sort of computer was it?

My own particular set of computer horror stories include a batch of Olivetti laptops (Pentium I-era) that refused to run a critical business app, a Gateway Desktop that refused to run a critical database app, a Sony Vaio desktop that was cute but completely useless ... all of which I would cheerfully have shot.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

I would buy an LCD monitor and mount it to a wall somewhere in your house. Hook up the computer to it and use it to display photos, show the weather or other useful information. Over time you can add enhancements to it to better suit your needs, for example by turning the display into a touch screen, adding an IR remote, adding a mic+speakers and using skype to turn it into a video phone, etc.

kogir• 18 years ago

Storage server. I use Windows Home Server, but OpenSolaris with ZFS would be just as good if you don't need Windows system backups.

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

I'd set it up in the guest room as a machine for the guests to use while they're over. They usually just need the Internet and access to a printer.

martian• 18 years ago

Electric Sheep makes an amazing screen-saver -- could be a great piece of wall art? Other benefits would be that you'd be contributing to a massive art project and it'd make a great conversation piece: "what's that?", "oh, that's just Harrison Ford dreaming..."

khafra• 18 years ago

I have an old box lying around, meself. At first I used it as a file server/experiment (installed FreeBSD and Samba). Now, the drive is getting a little small for that. I'm thinking about

- HostAPD and experimenting with different wifi configurations, like one open/one closed network, maybe incorporate RADIUS or something cool.

- Try another OS that's intrigued me, like Haiku or Plan 9

- Set up a virtual honeynet, maybe connected to a graphic representation like in that one xkcd comic, and watch the malware go

krishnakanthc• 18 years ago

I donate the computing power by running BOINC on mine. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

ssharp• 18 years ago

I turned my old one into a bit of an entertainment machine. My HDTV has a VGA input, so I just hooked it up to the TV. I use it to play old Nintendo games, watch DVDs, iTunes movies, and TV shows off of Hulu.

jbrun• 18 years ago

Donate it to a third world country school. microrecycoop.org for example.

raamdev• 18 years ago

I think you meant microrecyccoop.org.

Donating to those who need a computer would be my first choice; donating CPU power to something like BOINC my second.

m0shen• 18 years ago

Maybe a pfsense firewall: http://www.pfsense.org/ Handiest feature: VPN servers (OpenVPN and PPTP)

steveplace• 18 years ago

Load up boxee on it and connect it to your tv

RobGR• 18 years ago

If you don't already have a redundant computer as a backup, consider making the spare share it's disk and using one of the rsync snapshot scripts out there to backup your important stuff regularly. Putting a comprehensive script on it that will get all your email out of your webmail accounts, download any other stuff like pics in your flickr account that you care about, and etc would be a good idea.

Put a kill-a-watt on it and see how much power it draws, to consider whether you should leave it on all the time. Booting it up once a week and running the backups might be smarter. As a rough back-of-the-envelope figure, at 11 cents a kilowatt-hour running one watt for a year costs a dollar -- so if it sucks 80 watts sitting their with no monitor (a reasonable figure) that's $80 bucks a year, if you are paying more than 11 cents it is correspondingly more.

You can never have too many backups, and in my experience having the data on a complete separate machine is more reliable and easier to recover from than USB disks or other schemes. If everything else dies, just flip on the backup machine and start working from there, presuming it has the necessary software installed.

compay• 18 years ago

Aquarium?

http://www.unlikelymoose.com/more/macquarium/macquarium_gene...

travisjeffery• 18 years ago

If you do any web development build your own server or build one just to store your files.

juliend2• 18 years ago

Good idea. I've learned so much by setting up a dev server in my local network. We work at home and every Web projects are done on this ubuntu laptop that is hidden in a drawer (for silence purpose). It's connected to the wifi and i have setup backup-manager (http://packages.debian.org/en/sid/backup-manager) to archive the whole /var/www/ dir (and the databases) into a tar on an external drive every night. There are a lot of tutorials out there to do your own Apache server on Linux.

matthewking• 18 years ago

Set it up as a media center with XBMC (http://xbmc.org/) its miles ahead of MythTV or any others that I've come across.

quantumhobbit• 18 years ago

I'll have to try that out. My MythTV setup is currently more effort to troubleshoot than it is worth.

electromagnetic• 18 years ago

I personally run TVersity for my Xbox 360. When I was looking around I couldn't see if XBMC could transcode on the fly, which is what I really needed. TVersity works great, is simple and sits quietly in the background like a good little app should. It can also do pretty heavy transcoding, like 720p to 480p (my laptop does beyond 1080p, so I've had little compunction to upgrade my TV, but I like watching things on TV at the same time as it allows me to use my laptop fully and still watch a show) and still tolerate my wife playing video games. I guess it's more a testament to dual-core processors really.

jaytee_clone• 18 years ago

Donate it to a kid in need.

vorador2• 18 years ago

Install linux on it and in ten years you'll get a kernel hacker (yes, growing hackers actually takes ten years)

johngunderman• 18 years ago

http://xkcd.com/350/

PKeeble• 18 years ago

I installed lots of disks in Raid 5 into my spare machine, stuck it in a cupboard and use it as a file/backup and UPNP server.

All my other machines use the drives on their for storage and backup and use small and fast drives such as the WD Raptor instead of something like the Spinpoint 1TB drive.

Improves the performance of my real desktop and puts my data under linux rather than windows making remote access possible if I want to take the risk,

abdulhaq• 18 years ago

The big problem is power consumption - do you really want that ~200W power draw, 24hrs a day, burning up the environment?

Giving it to someone who needs it for their main PC is the best bet.

jcl• 18 years ago

On the other hand, a few boxes running Fold@Home is a conscientious alternative to a space heater. :)

notauser• 18 years ago

Right now it is hovering around 0C here, and our heating is all electric, so there is no real downside to running extra electronics.

epi0Bauqu• 18 years ago

The people we bought our house from left an old P-333 GW2000. I turned it into a smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org/). The routers the ISPs have drawbacks like not supporting enough simultaneous connections (usually do to RAM constraints). So I dropped their router, put the smoothwall in its place, and never looked back.

mixmax2• 18 years ago

I have an old IBM X21 that served me well for many years, and is now enjoying its retirement in a drawer. I'm thinking about bringing it back and putting it on the steering console of my boat (Live on a boat) where it should perform the following operations:

- control lighting, I'm looking into installing RGB LED's and so it would be ultracool to be able to have a program that can actually control the LED's, with different shades of colors, turning down the light when the sun goes up, etc.

- monitor engine vitals. A friend of mine has done some really cool small wireless data recorders that can be used (http://dzl.dk/projects/electronics/102logger/102logger.html)

- power usage. When I'm sailing everything runs on batteries, so I really want to monitor how much power I'm using and how much I've got left.

- Charts. I'. thinlking about a webbased application that shows the boat in the middle of Google maps, so I know what's around me when I'm out sailing. There's usually 3G wireless when you're close to land.

- Music. Last.fm when I'm on the net, mp3's when I'm out to sea.

mixmax2• 18 years ago

Oh, and if anyone wants to join in the fun of programming some of this shoot me a mail, particularly controlling RGB LED's is a fun project I think :-)

Might even end up as a startup...

lallysingh• 18 years ago

If you don't want to give it away, make it a storage machine. Keep it off & safe most of the time, boot it up once a week, let it save your important data, and then shut it off.

Pretty hard to hack a computer with no power. Pretty hard to accidentally delete a file from one, too.

But, old computer buildup is why I'm looking into getting a local rack, possibly a bladecenter for home use. I can usually use some more power for long-running/heavy-load programs, but I don't want to have that many desktop boxes under my desk. I'd rather just accumulate a local grid.

mcandre• 18 years ago

I've always wanted to turn an old PC into a networked jukebox. Usually, I leave the current OS on it and use it for development testing. A firewall would be good, but don't forget physical security. Many web cams come with activity monitor software...

aliasaria• 18 years ago

Use LCARS 24 to turn an older computer into an awesome alarm clock / calendar with a startrek theme. (Geeky, yes, but still pretty cool)

http://lcars24.sourceforge.net/

GrandMasterBirt• 18 years ago

When I read the title I immediately knew the answer: bonfire! There is nothing more sattisfying than seeing all that metal/wood/rubber light up on fire the wood will burn, the aluminum will melt, and the rubber will stink to high heaven. Just don't think about how much that computer costs.

pg• 18 years ago

Only use the web on that, so you can work without distraction on your current computer.

kirubakaran2• 18 years ago

That requires the self-discipline of a monk.

vorador2• 18 years ago

Not necessarily. You can remove all web browsers and stick to pdf documentation.

pierrefar2• 18 years ago

Some excellent replies here, thank you all!

General replies:

1. I will not donate this computer as it's the only spare one I have. I do promise though to donate the next spare one I get.

2. It's a laptop, so turning it into an aquarium is not going to work. Poor fish.

3. The reaon that it's spare and not donatable is that the screen connection is very very loose and so the Force of Duct Tape is what's keeping it alive.

What I've decided to do based on the replies:

1. Install Linux (of course) and set up a central backup server, attach the house's printer to it, and attach the current external backup drive.

2. Turn it into a media server. I'll be trying both MythTV and XBMC and will report later.

3. I will donate the spare CPU cycles to Folding@Home, at least initially. BOINC and other distributed computing projects will get time. Maybe I'll cycle once a month.

Thank you again :)

Ask HN: What to do with a spare computer?

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