What to do with my old pc?

Hardware Hub
1

Hey guys,

A few months ago my GPU die and I didn’t have any hardware to troubleshoot the issue. So I bought a new PC, GPU prices were still super high so it worked out to be much cheaper to just get a prebuilt. After I got the new pc, did some troubleshooting on the dead pc and it seems that my gtx970 was the only thing to die and it was just out of warranty.

So now I have a decently beefy PC that is currently a paper weight. It is i7-4790k with 24Gb ram.

What would be some good ideas to put it to work? I was thinking about turning it into a pen-testing Lab, but have no idea how. For the last month or so I have just been loading it with random Linux Distros and playing around with them. I already have a media server that I barely use.

Let me know any suggestions or how I would go about turning it into a pen-testing lab and get started with that.

2

Sell it all and get one of southern ohio guns $240 berettas

3

So you could sell it, buy more RAM & SSD’s (if needed) for the new PC and just run VM’s on that.

You could also just use the old system headless to host some VM’s which you could then remote into from your new machine or run something like FreeNAS which will allow you to set up a NAS and then run some VM’s or more likely Jails (think containers) with some other software in.

Since you already have a media server you barely use, and you only wantto muck about with labs systems and not run permanent services in VM’s or Jails/containers I would go with the first approach and get the space etc back.

For mucking about with Pentesting create an internal network for the VM’s build a couple of windows servers and then another VM with Kali Linux and find a good guide. There are plenty of resources around doing this so you shouldn’t struggle.

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4

Just use the integrated graphics to set it up with Linux (my vote is on Fedora), figure out this kubernetes thing, and teach me as well

5

Load it up with Linux virtual machines. Learn Linux. And then help out the Level1 Linux community.

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Pass it down to the family? And get their old computer to learn things on.

7

I may look into this.

It is an option to look into.

Did not think of a NAS that could be useful move away from Dropbox and other online services.

Have not look into the pen-testing thing really just an idea that could be fun. nice to to know that it should’t be to hard to find a how to or a guide.

This is what I have been doing with the distros, but not the using them to learn things or play with things.

I am trying to do this now regardless of what i do with old PC.

yeah I think I would rather do that than sale it.

8
  • Turn it into a router
  • Use it as a secondary workstation
  • Learn electrical, computer, and reverse engineering
  • Donate it to church, library, or charity of your choice
  • Give it to someone that needs an computer in a underprivileged part of your state/town

Ranked as worst option to best option, top to bottom, in my opinion.

9

Strongly consternating all, but the router. Did not think about the library that maybe a good option.

10

You cou ld give it to me!

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but… its not an obsolete power pc mac

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12

I don’t need your sass.

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However, if @flazza has an extra computer, we will definitely take it off their hands XD

In other news, I still can’t figure out how to VNC into my other computer…

14

The server you VNC into needs to have a VNC server on it.

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I’d either sell it or turn it into a VM host. Or a NAS.

Spec is a bit overkill for a router, if you were to do that i’d virtualise the router and give it a dedicated WAN NIC.

But i’d lean towards turning it into a NAS or VM host. Stick a 10 gig NIC in it, a bunch of disks, an SSD and you have an awesome FreeNAS storage box for VMs running on your new PC.

Alternatively, do the same thing but run VMs on it.