Put Your Idlers to Work for a Good Cause! What To Do With All That Spare Horsepower You Have Lying Around
Sep 02, 2025 @ 7:00 am
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Admit it – you bought systems you’re not using.
We’ve all done it! You see a good deal and can’t resist. Or you have a grand vision for a vast digital empire but it never quite seems to get done (yet!). What do you do with all the spare LowEndBoxes you have lying around? Other than tracking them with MyIdlers, of course.
There’s a number of things you could consider doing with them to make the world a better place.
Thanks to LowEndTalk member @default for starting a thread on this topic.
Defeat Censorship
TOR (The Onion Router) is a protocol that obfuscates a user’s origin on the Internet. Traffic is processed through multiple nodes, so if you’re in downtown Beijing, you might appear to be coming from Kansas City. This is valuable if you’re behind some sort of censorship regime and trying to access a freer Internet. Of course, it can be used for nefarious purposes as well, but that’s true of most technologies, going back to the rock. It’s easy to run a TOR node. There are several different kinds, and the easiest is a relay node which is generally allowed by most providers (unlike exit nodes, which generally are not). Check out our tutorial.
Help Scientific Research

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
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