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View Full Version : :D OMG - Score!!! (what now?)



Skippy_X
April 13th, 2007, 07:29 PM
OK - here's the situation.

I recently got an internship in an IT dept at a local business. My buddy is the CIO. We were cleaning out the storeroom/shop-gopher's-office and we pulled out three retired servers.

My buddy said, "Get rid of them."

"um. Ok. How?"

"I don't care. Put them in your truck and take them home if you want. Just get rid of them."

SCORE!!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!

One of them will stay there as an LTSP server. The place is a windows shop, and I'm a *nixhead. 'til now my friend endured my "linux rocks" rants w/ a patient smile - as if thinking "oh - the poor afflicted fellow. Let him rant. It does him good." I mentioned when I started there that I'd like to play w/ an ltsp network - and he thinks it sounds like fun.

One of them is a server that neither one of us know the specs of. Could be about anything. 3 net cards, a couple of USB ports, so it's likely not too rickety a machine.

The third is a compaq server - 3 X P2 (not sure of the MHz), 2 gigs RAM, 6x18.6 Gig SCSI drives.

I'm thinking about putting a SATA card in my current desktop (1.6 GHz athlon, 256 megs), adding some big drives and making it a mythtv backend. Use the p2 server for a desktop (already got a pretty good vid card and sound card on my current desktop), and using the unknown-spec server for something else.

I'm stoked. But - now what? What on earth would you do if you got your fingers on that?

(oh - here's something cool. They've a warehouse full of retired 1 GHz class machines. The 2nd in charge there - with just a little push - is thinking "cluster".)

Ok - suggestions?

daynah
April 13th, 2007, 07:37 PM
If you don't need three, ever thought about using it for charity? I dunno, converting it to a computer, giving it to a YMCA or WMCA or homeless shelter or poor school with Ubuntu or edubuntu on it? Or using it as a server to sell server space and make money off of it, and the profits go to charity?

Fascination
April 14th, 2007, 07:49 AM
Use them to learn as much as you can about networking, creating your own little playground to experiment different scenarios out on to become a better sysadmin. If you're feel generous, you could give away/sell accounts for other users to play on it too. :P

maniacmusician
April 14th, 2007, 09:24 AM
that makes me drool. I wish I had spare computers with those specs lying around.

Something I've been dying to try, and you probably can now, is a thin-client setup, but you're already doing that at the local business right? I dunno then. you could setup the compaq server as a media server, or use that as a file server (so that all machines, linux or windows, can access it). I dunno what more you can do with it.