I’ve got a few Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 pc lying around, most have broken hard drive or blown up power supply. So what to do with them? I figure I can use them as “server” machine for my own casual development team (yes, code-for-fun . I brought a couple of new hard drive and a couple of power supply unit, total up to about RM500. This new hardware parts allow me to setup two P3 500 machine with 128MB RAM each (harvested from other dead PCs) and 160GB HDD space.

I’ve setup minimal CentOS installation on both machine, and then mediawiki + subversion + Track+ on 1 machine (god I love subversion), and samba server (primary for backup purposes) on another machine. The total disk space usage after the installation was about 400MB.

Although with the low hardware specs, this configuration seems to work for me and my team of 6 guys, regularly committing/editing/creating project development artifacts. Perhaps I’ll increase the RAM available on the machine with mediawiki when I manage to get some old RAM out from somewhere, since it does seems to go high on memory usage, especially upload of big files …etc…

This setup give us a minimal platform for project development collaboration, but ultimately, I would really love to see a full implementation of Microsoft Visual Team Suite… ^_^ (but of course it wont be a P3 with 128MB RAM, more like a multi processor server with GBs of RAMs… hm… need more $$$ )