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?

you really might not.

before there were mobile phones there was analog dtmf wired telephones. they replaced pulse dialing and allowed for all kinds of additional signalling and triggering. ring a bell, operate a relay, kick people off so you could call the president, entire automated analog switching centers, you name it.

when mobile networks came on the scene there were all sorts of additional triggers but because the (second gen? the ones that could do sms) signals were actually digital, there was a much wider array of possibilities. dtmf had a handful of frequencies it supported and if you wanted to do something more you had to basically make sure the entire network you were using could send, transport and receive those frequencies.

now imagine instead of sixteen combinations of frequencies played at the same time you have access to thousands of possible triggers. once you have simple stuff like the basic receiving of text and lighting a led or playing one of several legally distinct jingles covered, you could do do much more. and people did. there were all kinds of things pagers could do through combinations of local interface and digital communication with a cell tower, all mediated through a handful of baseband chips on the pager pcb that could have the pins for stuff they wouldn’t be used for disconnected.

but how would you make a pager set off an explosive?

well, the same way you use a casio f91w wristwatch to. you use its built in functionality (the speaker when the alarm goes off) to trigger a battery that can deliver enough electricity into a resistor to heat it up enough to make your (primary) explosive detonate.

in the case of a pager, those baseband chips have all kinds of on and off switching built in. it’s not hard to imagine that basic, out of the box functionality would include pulling a pin high when it gets “*97” or some such. now tie that pin to the base of a transistor across the positive and negative terminals of the battery and sitting against a little petn and you got yourself a remotely triggered explosive.

you wouldn’t even need a pcb.

there’s probably a lot of stuff thats incorrect in this reply. it’s late and this is off the dome.

it is?

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?

gotta start somewhere. i’m not really interested in trump or what makes him happy.

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.

I’m bloodfart and I’m voting third party this election!

The party for socialism and liberation is running on a platform of Palestinian statehood and an end to weapons shipments for Israel.

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.