LAMP setup on elderly hardware?

Question

My former roommate agreed to host my web site for a while on his server while I got situated at my new apartment with my wife (also new). He is looking to move soon and wants to retire his web server, so I need to build a server for my own use.

I investigated setting up a virtual box on the Mac Mini that I use for development, but I can't really guarantee it will always be available, so I'd like to have hardware dedicated to serving up the site.

The old setup is LAMP, and I'm pretty comfortable in Linux, LAMP seems the way to go, but the spare hardware I have is OLD - 3/486, 32 or 64 meg of ram, with a HD somewhere between 8 and 16 gigs.

Due to setting up budget with my wife, however, new hardware is pretty much out.

What do you guys think? Can I get a LAMP setup running on hardware that old and constrained? Some of the pages leverage MySQL and Php, so it's not straight static HTML, but I'm not running Java or anything. Are there distros specially suited for this sort of setup?

Answer 1

You could probably find a free machine orders of magnitude better than that one just by asking around.

Answer 2

Just a tip, but from personal experience I've found that FreeBSD works much better on low-end hardware than a modern Linux distro does.

Answer 3

It will run on that hardware, sure, but it depends entirely on what kind of load the apps will put on it (lots of complex db access for instance), and also how many hits it will get.

If it's just something for you to play around with and test things then it will work just fine, although you can probably grab a PIII server for virtually nothing these days if you want something a bit beefier.

Answer 4

I would just like to point out that 8 or 16 gb hdd's were not so common in the time of the 386's. More like 100-500mb range. Same goes for RAM. Other than that, I agree with others - better configuration could probably be found at a dumpster these days. This is seriously old.