I'd been pondering for a while about the best use to make of a couple of old computers of mine. They were both Celeron 466 powered machines with between 64mb and 320mb of memory. The hard discs have long been stripped out and used in newer computers and I was left only with a pathetic pair of 6gb hard drives between them.

Then I discovered Linux and put one machine to use in being an Apache Web Server running Samba, MySQL, PHP, PHPWeb, Perl, WordPress, MediaWiki and a print server on my wireless home network. But that's a story for later...

The other machine has now risen from the ashes of scrapdom and been reborn as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. I'd been looking into buying more hard discs for my ever growing collection of digital photos, digital video, mp3 files and internet junk. The trouble was that they needed to be installed on a computer running an operating system which would need configuring etc, etc.

Then I heard of NAS devices and i loved the idea that you could have a hard disc with an network card plugged into a network. But the prices, oh the prices! Take the price of a hard disc and double it for the case and network interface. It was not even a remote possibility.

So I did a bit of searching on tinternet and discovered NASLite, a free program which converts old PC's into NAS devices. The story will follow soon ...

MicroMart

Bingle Bongle (c) 2006