The "Tank" Project

Upgrade of an old 486

WHAT IS IT?



This page begins the saga of the fascinating but arduous process I'm going through to take an old (bought in 1992 as a "bare bones" system with no monitor or other peripherals) 486 tower clone and transform it into a fully functional Linux box.   In it's original (and current) state, it couldn't run much more than something like Windoze 3.1, but here is where Linux shines....

These are the original specs (with earlier upgrades noted):

The thing must weigh at least 50 lbs, thus the name "Tank"!   But in it's day, it was a "screamin' 486/33" and about the fastest you could get at that time was a DX2/50 (which this motherboard can handle).

Well... some pieces and parts later, this is where it's at now (9/4/99):
I'd like to replace the 1MB SIMMS with 4MB SIMMS to take it to 32MB, but finding SIMMS nowadays is a joke.   All those years I saw ads from companies trying to get rid of them, but I didn't need or want them then.   Now it's "72-pin city", and I'm relying on friends with boxes of SIMMS laying around who don't need them anymore.   If anything, they're often happy to get rid of old stuff that they didn't want to throw out (another man's junk...) in case they needed it for something!

Anyway... being that I have a cable modem and a connection that is up 24/7, plus a machine (my notebook) that seems to now be pretty much stationary and on the net during that 24/7, I figured that I could use a good firewall on my newly created home network.   Now you might tell me that my provider "already has a firewall".   Sure.   And that would supposedly protect me from the "outside", the net.   But as I'm often told in the company's literature, with a cable modem and data running across a fiber optic cable line, I'm on a "LAN" and I seriously doubt that there are firewalls between me and my "neighbors", most of whom were "early adopters" and are probably very computer saavy.   Not that I'm particularly paranoid, but I always like to protect myself.   Okay, so I can unplug from the network, but see... me like alot of others... often connect to the home machine while at work to bring over that work document that you put on floppy but forgot to bring with you.   So... keeping it plugged in is a blessing, but it's best to watch your back and your front!

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