

Ask HN: What to do with a spare computer? - pierrefar

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:<p>What are some cool/useful things to do with a spare computer?<p>I'm looking for interesting extra functionality I can add to the house.<p>Thanks!
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old-gregg
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
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.

------
quellhorst
Give it to someone who has an even older computer.

~~~
swilliams
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.

------
pierrefar
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 :)

------
RobGR
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.

------
trickjarrett
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.

------
speek
Asterisk.

Samba share.

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

------
ericb
Make it a mythtv box?

<http://www.mythtv.org/>

------
johngunderman
<http://xkcd.com/350/>

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

~~~
kirubakaran
That requires the self-discipline of a monk.

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

~~~
kirubakaran
Doing something like that is not a problem. Keeping it that way is the
challenge. (At least for me)

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matthewking
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.

~~~
electromagnetic
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.

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

~~~
raamdev
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.

------
khafra
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

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

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

------
mixmax
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.

~~~
mixmax
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...

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

~~~
juliend2
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.

------
lallysingh
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.

------
PKeeble
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,

------
m0shen
Maybe a pfsense firewall: <http://www.pfsense.org/> Handiest feature: VPN
servers (OpenVPN and PPTP)

------
cstejerean
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.

------
epi0Bauqu
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.

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

------
jaytee_clone
Donate it to a kid in need.

~~~
vorador
+1

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

------
martian
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..."

------
mcandre
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
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/>

------
ssharp
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.

------
compay
Aquarium?

[http://www.unlikelymoose.com/more/macquarium/macquarium_gene...](http://www.unlikelymoose.com/more/macquarium/macquarium_genesis02.html)

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

------
steveplace
Load up boxee on it and connect it to your tv

------
pclark
Boxee.

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

Or put it in the kitchen for recipes etc.

------
GrandMasterBirt
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.

