A hobby for those with just a little free time, and too much technical savvy:

Raid your friendly neighborhood boneyard (e.g. FreeGeek) for dead hardware. A Pentium III with 512 MB of RAM and a rattling IDE drive will do. We are surfing MooresLaw in reverse here (unlike the big MonsterGarage shops like MicroSoft, Apple, Sun, Adobe, etc, who write slops and then depend on MooresLaw to catch up with them before shipping time).

Now install LinuxOperatingSystem 2.14 on it, connect it to your friendly neighborhood InternetServiceProvider, and put a Web site or three on it. Drive that up to a starting capacity of, say, 64 000 hits a day.

You are now running an internationally-respected (or possibly despised;) WebSite on hardware that cannot support SqlServer or similar iron hogs.

Cool!

''Just hope you don't get SlashDotted...''  ;-)

I love the concept!  However, a more useful application might be something like a Seti@Home style ParallelProject.  Anyone interested?  

''The problem is that there are very few user-friendly distros that support this paradigm.  The moment a distro decides to have a decent GUI they give up on boneyard support and start cramming every bleeding-edge service onto the box.  So, what's the OSS equivalent of WinNT4 + ISS?  That is, an OS I can run on a Pentium 90 and have a GUI-configured webserver?  I've gotten Xubuntu onto a 400mhz Pentium, but that required maxing out it's RAM first.'' --MartinZarate

Arguably, that's the tradeoff. I don't feel it's a big deal to configure a webserver without using a GUI. Why not just run any mainstream distro without loading up the GUI and optional services? --MarkSchumann

''The "user friendly" part.  That was why I mentioned NT4 + ISS - I get a legacy-box GUI-configurable webserver that way.  I'm speaking here as someone who's not too comfortable with Bash, Vi, etc.  I'm trying anyways - the Xubuntu is just an intermediate step for a Linux newb.''

I think I wrote this page, but I can't remember. Next up, L''''''inuxServersOnBoneyardNotebookFragments! --PhlIp