I recieved a few emails over the past few days from various folks in a specific user group who were looking for flavors of UNIX to put on some old machines they were donated.

The poor folks ended up getting similar hardware that I used to have on my NAT box; bad BIOS that can’t speak above 16MB properly; ISA controllers, the whole lot. They ended up using an elder version of my FreeBSD-RANKIN distribution, and were pleased to see that not only did it stop crashing, it was so stable that they were able to use one of these old 90Mhz machines as a dedicated NAT box on a PPPoE cablemodem. That, and with thttpd, they’ve even got an internal webserver running on it – all on a 90Mhz PC with 32M of RAM and a 2G HD that couldn’t even boot OpenBSD or Linux.

I decided to make their lives easier for the production of their other machines; I’ve converted my archive into a unified diff, and updated a few tools while I was at it. This was no easy task! For starters, the system I initally created this for, I, myself, donated last year, so I had no machine that would be ‘old’ enough to test most of these patches on! Thankfully, I still have my old copy of Virtual PC, and managed to get it to boot. FreeBSD-3.5.1 was released on July 28th, 2000 (Happy birthday, little guy!), and has been thrown to the wayside in favor of 4.x, and the recent 5.x technology releases.

Of course, it didn’t understand what my internal DVD-Rom drive was, so I had to mount the CD on a local machine, then do an FTP install over the network. This was taxing of itself, but how slow emulation is, even compared to a 90Mhz machine – it took quite a bit of time – and patience. I ended up rounding things up, updating a few more tools, and diffing everything off from my quirky ‘partial tarball’ distribution I released last year.

The rest, as they say, is history. It (still) works, and it gets another breath of life, in the very least, as a NAT box for a user group in Illinois.