Someone already said the firewall, and that’s the most straightforward answer, but there’s lots of stuff a server can be used for and most of those have some facility for making a distinction between unauthenticated users and authenticated ones. So as a second recommendation: use the permissions system.

What are you actually trying to do?

I’ve never seen a smps catch fire. Is that a failure state for them?

Some more things I’ve used old netbooks for:

Portable pxe boot server

Audio source for mixing (think using a mixing board to do audio collage work with tape, record and digital sources)

Midi sequencer- the cheap usb to midi breakout cable works good here and you really don’t need much horsepower to sequence midi.

Tracker playback and editing

Display driver/art/digital photo collage/digital signage/whatever.

E: People will tell you that you’re better off with a sbc because it’ll save you money on power. Do your own research on this. A kill-a-watt is cheap and the power savings quickly gets murky.

The c2d MacBooks ought to have relatively cheap and available batteries. Why not put one in?

There’s lots of uses for it.

An overlay network like nebula uses “lighthouse” nodes as ways to reverse proxy to all the other hosts in the overlay. I’ve used og eeepcs as nebula lighthouses before.

“Dumb” 3d printers honestly don’t need much to bring their feature set in line with expensive ones. I still use an old netbook to control two. The screen and keyboard are great when I want to check files. Slicers and whatnot can easily run in low resource settings on those computers.

Vents allowing (and many netbooks do!), you can slide the computer into a shelf and use ssh to perform tasks on it. There’s a bunch of stuff that an always on computer with a built in battery backup can be used for at times, especially if it’s on a wired connection and you can use the wireless interface.

People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.

There’s a bunch of dot files and directories in your home directory that are used to store configurations and presets and stuff.

It used to be that if you logged in without those files and directories then x, the display manager, the other software etc would copy over stub versions and that’s how you get “defaults”.

So when I have a hairy x session I used to delete the configuration files and directories and let it repopulate with defaults.

Nowadays I don’t do that anymore, but it used to be an issue.

E: try ctrl alt f1 or two or something and see if you get a terminal or login prompt.

You can always just delete you user config directories, uninstall Xfce then log back in snd see what happens…

Oh I don’t care what distro you use. It’s just funny to say numbnuts instead of numbat.

old windows -> xfce/lxqt/whatever

nuwindows -> kde

macos/phones -> gnome

you’re running xfce!

do you want to be running some other desktop environment?

if so, look at what kind of session your remote connection software is asking the remote machine to start.

ubuntu numbnuts

amber is the color of its energy!

running a “second seat” on a different F key like in the link might be a good way to do that.

back in the day i would just log out and log in. there’s so much going on with desktop environments i kinda had to spend some time in one doing my daily to figure out if it was what i wanted.

So you have a lot of suggestions in this thread.

I have an unconventional one:

Red hat.

You can use it for free as long as you register on their website.

The benefit: lots of documentation, a significantly different way of thinking about things (it asks you to define a compliance posture out of the box lol) and a package manager that does a lot of things right.

You said yourself youve been in the game for a while. Why not try being agent smith instead of neo?

It’s helpful to in this case to say what you’re actually trying to do.

I don’t think you want multiseat, but I did something similar with x back in the day using a configuration for users similar to what’s described here.

Note that that isn’t what you asked for. It’s having multiple x sessions on different f1, f2 etc keys.

The data is stored in little ccd cells. It’s recorded as an analog voltage. There is no difference between analog voltages and digital voltages, I’m just using the word analog to establish that the potential is a domain that can vary continuously.

When you read the data, the levels of the voltages are checked and translated to the digital information they represent.

To determine the level of a voltage, a small amount of current is allowed to flow between the two points being measured. It’s a very small amount. Microamps and less.

When you draw current from a charge carrying device the charge, as represented by the potential between its negative and positive terminals, the voltage, decreases.

When the controller in the ssd responsible for reading voltages and assembling them into porno.mov doesn’t get a clear read, it asks again. As the ssd ages, parts of it can be re queried hundreds of times just to get commonly read information into memory like system files.

So the ssd degrades on read, and the user experiences this as “slowness”.

Would rewriting the data fix this problem? Yes. Using either badblocks -n, dd or a program called spinrite, rewriting the data fixes that problem.

Why doesn’t the ssd just do it? Because the ssd only has so many write cycles before its toast. Better to rely on the user or more accurately the host os to dictate those writes than to take on that responsibility.

Yes. They also slowly take longer to access their data with every read.

There isn’t anything that meets your criteria.

Optical suffers from separation, hard drives break down, ssds lose their charge, tape is fantastic but has a high cost of entry.

There’s a lot of replies here, but if I were you I’d get last generation or two’s lto machine from some surplus auction and use that.

People hate being told to use magnetic tape, but it’s very reliable, long lived, pretty cost effective once you have a machine and surprisingly repairable.

What few replies are talking about is the storage conditions. If your archive can be relatively small and disconnected then you can easily meet some easy requirements for long term storage like temperature and humidity stability with a cardboard box, styrofoam cut to shape and desiccant packs (remember to rotate these!). An antifungal/antimicrobial agent on some level would be good too.

Have you considered providing them with a typewriter, ledger and calculator instead?

How much (metal, refined, produced on earth) wire would you say is required to produce an air (actually vacuum, but we know air core really well so there’s math for them) core electromagnet which can generate a field capable of deflecting solar wind over the area of its pv array? In order to maintain that field strength, how much current is required? Can it be supplied by a pv array equal in area to the effective field area? How many of those are needed to cover the area of mars?

That’s-a lotta metal!

Also speaking as a person who deals with e-waste daily, it’s both by volume and mass composed of petroleum products. Fiberglass is reenforced plastic. Ics are 90% plastic by volume. Discrete components are made of petroleum distillates in a lot of cases and encased in them in even more cases!

Even if you only considered the boards as the e-waste and not the plastic cases and bodies themselves, those dont exist in a vacuum like our hypothetical electromagnets, a reduction in printer boards means fewer printers which are almost completely just plastic.