As I said in my post, I talked about wanting to take an old PC and make it in to a Security Onion box.

So step one was to get the old box running, and grab the old data I had stored on it. This included a 500 gig data drive, of multimedia files going back several years. But that was easier said than done.

The first thing I needed to find was a wired keyboard and mouse. That wasn’t’ as easy as it seems. There were lots of Gamer ones, going for over $50.00. I ended up going to 4 stores. Most had empty shelves for the cheap ones, and lots of overly expensive gamer ones.

The second problem I had was that I couldn’t get any thing to burn off my laptop’s burner. I got around that with a portable I had handy, but even that was hit or miss.

The third problem was getting Xubuntu, which I used in live mode, to copy the data to back usb external drive, kept having problem seeing all the drives. Including the one I had Untangled installed on. After lots of moving back and forth, I got the data off.

The fourth issue, the 24 inch monitor I was going to use was broken. Something hit it, and caused a nice circle and spider web design. But it left the whole screen messed up.

Step two: Replace the hardware. The box was running a P4 32-bit processor. The fan on the processor was failing. The downside, the new mother board and processor I got for free, while a core 2 duo, won’t support my ide hard drives. The power supply in the case wasn’t good enough to power the system either.

So this was mostly and exercise in futility. I’m not sure if I’m going to get and build a new desktop / tower, or just get the micro server I was planning and install Security Onion on that.