Is it possible to do this on a P3?

C

ChannelZ

I have lots of old Computers here and I'm sort of a collector. With old I don't mean some discarded P4s or even P3s, but also old Amigas, 68k Macs and the like. Now even though while old, many of these Systems are still capable of at least 10 mbit connections via Ethernet.

Now the other day I found my old P3 650 Mhz with BX chipset in my closet, it has 512 MB of ECC RAM, boots even without installed graphics card and a PCI SATA-Controller and Quad Ethernetport from Intel I think I still also have somewhere.
I would just need to get a case and maybe a better quality power supply. What I would like to do with this System is making it act as a WLAN-Router for my modern i7 and various old systems, and also as a FTP-Fileserver (nothing fancier than that, more many of these old Systems can't do reliable anyways) and then if there's still room, a torrent box and maybe also MP3-Jukebox. All this headless without any X11-Server installed, just remote control via ssh. WLAN I'd do via a dongle and USB 2.0 Controller card, as the mainboard only supports USB 1.1.

On the other side, there are also these very fancy Atom Mainboards you can get for really cheap and are probably somewhat less power hungry. (even though to be honest, I don't assume much less) For me as retro hardware enthusiast it would still be cool do be able to pull all this off with a P3 and FreeBSD and would have worth in it's own right. I don't have experience with FreeBSD, but have used Gentoo Linux on my main System for many years now. What I want to ask is, has anybody a similar setup? Will this system be able to pull it off? I don't really know where to put the P3 performance-wise anymore. It also doesn't need to be super-fast, it just needs to work.
 
Yes, it can be a router. As far as power usage, I'd bet that PIII will take more than a modern full system. So it may not be worth continuing to use it that way, but fun as an experiment.

FreeBSD does not install X11 by default, and most users do not install X11 on servers at all.
 
I dug around a little and saw power consumption of a Coppermine-System (with HD) quoted from anything between 30W-50W, depending on load which of course will probably not size up to an Atom, but quite frankly, isn't THAT bad either. The system wouldn't run 24/7 but just on a "as needed" basis. Wake up on LAN is possible.

I already booted FreeBSD via CF-Card-to-IDE Adapter which was the easiest thing to do. Everything was suprisingly quick.
 
I don't, but I'll get one soon as I'm more and more interested in energy efficiency, as the electricity costs in my country keep climbing.

I doubt I'd reach those values with the 90s power supply I tested it with, a modern 200W power supply probably fares quite a bit better. Didn't found anything I'd like yet, though.
 
I'd maybe run a minimalized kernel also, in case the memory installed isn't upto using the newer package (install) tools ... if applicable.
 
It seems a good idea to me, and I'm planning something similar myself.

If you're worried about power consumption, look into whether a Coppermine based Celeron might be compatible. The 533MHz Coppermine Celeron has an 11.2W TDP according to Wikipedia, and others in the range aren't a lot higher.

I would be curious to know what WLAN card you're intending to use, the PCI and USB adapters I've experimenting with have been lacking in range compared to my old Linksys WRT54G.
 
My first serious installation of FreeBSD was version 5 on a P3 550Mhz with 192MB ram. I was doing developing but also ran Gnome and Firefox as my browser as well as Inkscape. Not all at once, and it took forever to install from ports but I got along just fine for most things.

I had two of them running as servers until just four or five years ago.
 
This is sadly going to take longer than I expected. I had stability issues with the Pentium III. I have a PCI/ISA diagnostic card that's really helpful sometimes to discern what's wrong with old PCs when they don't fully POST. The P3 in my tests would sometimes stay completely dead without apparent reason and not even get as far as to start loading the BIOS (like if there wasn't a CPU present, which is usually not a good sign). I then noticed that, depending on how I pushed down on the CPU, it would work (or not).

So after resoldering the Slot for the CPU this improved a lot (apparently a cold soldering joint) and things got better but I'd still run into situations where the computer wouldn't fully start, wouldn't fully shut down, had problems with the ACPI standby states, (it does already support that) would suddenly start with power applied without pressing the power button, had problems with booting with some AGP graphics cards I had lying around etc.. In the end I noticed that while the Capacitors still looked fine, testing them for ESR and capacitance provided they really, really were not and visually even some of them began to leak (not by blowing their vent at the top, but by leaking around the seals of their legs at the bottom). For reference, it's an ABit BH-6 (otherwise a really fine 440BX board with various clocking and even voltage options) and while it's a bit of an early runner for the capacitor plague I could find references regarding bad caps on that board via google in various forums.

There are like, 4 different brands of el-cheapo capacitors on that board so it's clear that ABit took the lowest bidder. I'm going to recap the entire board with high quality low-ESR Caps from Panasonic and I'm quite optimistic that this will solve at least most problems. (Might even shave off a bit from that power bill) This Pentium 3 already ceased to be economical a bit before and it'd would have been cheaper to get some Atom Board, (and while the Atom is kind of a disappointing CPU, it would no doubts perform better on a Performance/Watt ratio basis) but now I wanna go through with it, and it's fun to work around the limitations. If it's not going to perform well enough or be way too power hungry, I'll just transform it into a retro gaming rig, so no big loss.

dscrdia said:
It seems a good idea to me, and I'm planning something similar myself.

If you're worried about power consumption, look into whether a Coppermine based Celeron might be compatible. The 533MHz Coppermine Celeron has an 11.2W TDP according to Wikipedia, and others in the range aren't a lot higher.

I would be curious to know what WLAN card you're intending to use, the PCI and USB adapters I've experimenting with have been lacking in range compared to my old Linksys WRT54G.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip about that Celeron, even though they don't seem to exist as slot A. I am not massively worried about the power consumption, it's not a P4 after all. The harddisks it'll get for Data will be "turn on on demand", I might also get an DOM-Module as systems Harddrive, not sure what FreeBSD does in the way of swapping though. I also plan to feed some other small devices I have standing around from it's power supply, it'll get a 300W Be Quiet! System Power 7 as it seems to be a well performer in the realms of efficiency even with such low powered devices. I also noticed that the Mainboard has no trouble booting without any graphics card, so that'll shave off a bit too.

I plan on using an USB 2.0 PCI Card with USB WLAN dongle, for my internet needs, that's fast enough and I have some flexibility with all the USB-Ports. (don't exactly have fast internet here) It was hard to find an USB PCI card that does the 500 mA current limitation on it's ports properly though, there's a lot of junk on eBay.
I use an RT5370 based dongle with Antenna. In my experiments with an R-Pi (which I don't use for this as the expandability of the RPi is really awkward and limited) it proved to be working well. The important thing for good reception didn't seem to be the chipset, but having an antenna.
 
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