On Mar 26, 2013, at 10:06 PM, Creamy <cre...@nocrater.com> wrote:
>>> Looking to the future, when are we going to drop 486 support, anyway?
>>
>> Now, that's a more interesting thing ask.
>
> How much of the hardware survives now, anyway? I mean at least the old
> Vaxen were, (and are), maintainable. 486 motherboard dies, what do you
> do? Chances are it's a multi-layer pcb, so if traces go bad within it,
> a repair is going to be almost impossible.
>From personal experience, the oldest things I've used *recently* was a
Pentium Pro a few years back for providing Internet connectivity. That
was when we barely had a single Mbit/s per line here in Germany. To be
honest, it was about 8 years ago. I know a case study means nothing,
so let me try another route.
You would only need to upgrade to the latest and greatest release if
one of the following is true:
(1) Your system is connected to the Internet and thus
requires frequent security updates.
(2) You want to run services that are bleeding edge
like OpenSMTPD out of the box.
(3) You are crazy.
But seriously, if there is no networking, there is no need to run a
recent release. And you will be able to run 5.3 in any case. And why
would you use networking anyway with such small throughput, the
likelihood of your tiny IBM disk (awwww, those were the days!)
failing on you any second now. All you've got there is a ticking
time bomb. Nobody in their right mind would have such a system as
mission critical infrastructure. :)
