Am posting here, as I'm not sure where it would better fit ('Operating Systems'? '*nix'?). Feel free to recommend another thread...
Went down to my parents' house this weekend and with my cousin tried firing up half a dozen old systems we have lying about the place. Somewhat to my surprise all of them managed to POST save the newest machine (an Athlon XP 2500+ 'Barton' whose Abit NF7-M motherboard might be fracked).
Anyhow, the least capable system (since we trashed our old 486) is a hoary Socket 7 machine with an AMD K6 III 400 MHz. The cpu, if I recall correctly, wasn't too shabby, indeed, one of the better x86 processors until Pentium III arrived. Anyhow, the problem is that the motherboard only takes... EDO RAM! There's 64 MB inside, and who knows if I'll ever come upon more in my lifetime.
I hate the thought of simply rubbishing the whole machine, and there's no way I could in good conscience 'donate' this to anyone. So I thought perhaps I could turn it into a thin client. If I could make a Remote Desktop connexion to my Hyper-V server, I could access a Windows Vista VM and thus turn my ancient K6 III virtually into a modern computer.
Windows 98 should run okay on 64 MB (and it's what the system currently runs), and there are versions of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client that will run on 98. The problem is that to connect to my Hyper-V server, I must of course jack into my LAN and thus at least indirectly to the Internet. I'm not sure how confident I am in Windows 98's security in AD 2009...
I suppose I could lock down the client by installing a firewall that blocked every port save RDP. Would that be adequate? Somehow I suspect there would still be major vulnerabilities somewhere (this is Microsoft Windows after all, and years before XP Service Pack 2).
I'd probably feel more comfortable running some sort of minimal Linux. I'd need a distribution that was exceedingly lightweight yet able to produce a graphical desktop environment that would support an RDP-capable client. Perhaps something like Thinstation -- anyone ever use this distro? Other recommendations?
Of course I've left out the most important detail, which is the NIC inside the machine. I'm not at my parents' house any more, so I'll have to look it up later, but I think it was an old Intel network adapter. I hope there will be Linux driver support, but otherwise I may have to stick with Windows 98.
Went down to my parents' house this weekend and with my cousin tried firing up half a dozen old systems we have lying about the place. Somewhat to my surprise all of them managed to POST save the newest machine (an Athlon XP 2500+ 'Barton' whose Abit NF7-M motherboard might be fracked).
Anyhow, the least capable system (since we trashed our old 486) is a hoary Socket 7 machine with an AMD K6 III 400 MHz. The cpu, if I recall correctly, wasn't too shabby, indeed, one of the better x86 processors until Pentium III arrived. Anyhow, the problem is that the motherboard only takes... EDO RAM! There's 64 MB inside, and who knows if I'll ever come upon more in my lifetime.
I hate the thought of simply rubbishing the whole machine, and there's no way I could in good conscience 'donate' this to anyone. So I thought perhaps I could turn it into a thin client. If I could make a Remote Desktop connexion to my Hyper-V server, I could access a Windows Vista VM and thus turn my ancient K6 III virtually into a modern computer.
Windows 98 should run okay on 64 MB (and it's what the system currently runs), and there are versions of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client that will run on 98. The problem is that to connect to my Hyper-V server, I must of course jack into my LAN and thus at least indirectly to the Internet. I'm not sure how confident I am in Windows 98's security in AD 2009...
I suppose I could lock down the client by installing a firewall that blocked every port save RDP. Would that be adequate? Somehow I suspect there would still be major vulnerabilities somewhere (this is Microsoft Windows after all, and years before XP Service Pack 2).
I'd probably feel more comfortable running some sort of minimal Linux. I'd need a distribution that was exceedingly lightweight yet able to produce a graphical desktop environment that would support an RDP-capable client. Perhaps something like Thinstation -- anyone ever use this distro? Other recommendations?
Of course I've left out the most important detail, which is the NIC inside the machine. I'm not at my parents' house any more, so I'll have to look it up later, but I think it was an old Intel network adapter. I hope there will be Linux driver support, but otherwise I may have to stick with Windows 98.