well, one of my lectures at tech, took a redundancy package and is moving over to the gold coast, and offered a few of the students free computers that he had lying around as he couldnt take them with him... so i ended up getting for free a Pentium 2 400Mhz, with 192MB ram and a 10gb hardrive and duel nics. Its currently running windows server 2003 (not for long) which i dont have any account passwords to (and dont really care). So as the title says any suggestions on what to do with it, so far ive had the idea of making it a gateway.
he used to use it with ipcop hence the 2 nics, (before he trialled something on win server 2k3). Was quite surprised to see a coax port on it
Personally, i have many laptop and desktop. If it is the case for you too, i think a samba file server+ftp+ssh would be a good choice if you dont have one yet. You just have to add an hard drive+debian/slackware and you are realy to go. It is also perfect for backup and uses like that. If you don't have many computer or you prefer to use your main desktop as server, then +1 for gateway.
for a fileserver, i have an athlon xp based machine for that (more suited since it has onboard sata), i dont own a printer (and dont intend to buy one until after i finish studying at least) and guest computer wouldnt really work due to space restrictions in my room. the only thing with a gateway is how much would it realistically cost to power 24/7
Just give that poor rig some rest and recycle it. If you really can't come up with some use then why bother inventing something up? To me those P2-rigs seem like waste of electricity and cause of unnecessary heat&noise. Don't get me wrong, I used to have a P3 773 MHz or something underclocked to 450 MHz running debian for a year until I finally got a free shell from elsewhere. Now that I think of it... Running a computer 24/7 for a year only so that I can get to IRC seems like a high price.
tbh i don't think a p2 uses all that much power and the advantages of a proper gateway are worth it if you make use of them.
