What to do with my server?

Matthew K

Matthew K

Line Up and Wait
Joined
Sep 14, 2016
Messages
788
Location
Georgia
Display Name
Display name:
Broke Engineer
Hello all,

I know this isn't a computer specific forum, but since I know quite a bit of people on here are in IT, or are at least familiar with computers, I figured I'd see what you all suggested.

I have a Dell 2950 server I bought off Ebay a couple of years ago to experiment with. For the past few months, its just been sitting, collecting dust. I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on what to use it for, short of just being a data server(too much power draw and noise for just that)? I'd run my website off of it just for giggles but beloved comcast blocked off port 80 after running it for about a month.

Any reasonable suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.
 
spam generator.

set up a liveatc feed off it.

mscard's personal porn server.
 
Sounds like it would make for good target practice.
 
eman1200 said:
set up a liveatc feed off it.
Click to expand...
I definitely would have a liveatc setup at home, but I live outside the radius to get a good signal of tower, and I live in-between a bunch of trees, so that doesn't help either.
asicer said:
Put it back on eBay. If you want to play around with a server, spin up a VM on AWS.
Click to expand...
It'd cost more to ship than it would sell for. I'd rather go with @Ryanb 's idea and shoot it :D
 
Donate to local community college?
 
In the modern world with VMs, they're losing value rapidly. I'd just slap it on Craigslist or eBay (pick your poison) and maybe get enough money out of it for a dinner out. Maybe.
 
denverpilot said:
In the modern world with VMs, they're losing value rapidly. I'd just slap it on Craigslist or eBay (pick your poison) and maybe get enough money out of it for a dinner out. Maybe.
Click to expand...
What do you think VM's run on. Someone might buy it and make an ESX host out of it.
 
Proxmox - VM server, spin up as many as you want
Let's encrypt gets you to port 443 free
Owncloud
 
Host ur website on port 81

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk
 
exncsurfer said:
What do you think VM's run on. Someone might buy it and make an ESX host out of it.
Click to expand...

Too old and slow. Great box for what he did with it (learning stuff at home) but horribly outdated in the production VM hardware world.

We built a custom machine for handling piles of "throwaway VMs" at the office for less than $2000 that would smoke that 2950 so bad the 2950 wouldn't be caught up until next week.

Number of cores low, max RAM limits low, I/O bound disks, uses too much electricity at idle... it's just out of date. You won't get many VMs spun up on it unless they're small and use nearly no CPU and RAM.

I ran piles of those things in Production ten or more years ago, and they were long in the tooth five years ago.

Someone will buy it for exactly what he was doing with it, but it won't go for much money.

Only thing worse than cars for depreciation is server hardware.
 
denverpilot said:
Too old and slow. Great box for what he did with it (learning stuff at home) but horribly outdated in the production VM hardware world.

We built a custom machine for handling piles of "throwaway VMs" at the office for less than $2000 that would smoke that 2950 so bad the 2950 wouldn't be caught up until next week.

Number of cores low, max RAM limits low, I/O bound disks, uses too much electricity at idle... it's just out of date. You won't get many VMs spun up on it unless they're small and use nearly no CPU and RAM.

I ran piles of those things in Production ten or more years ago, and they were long in the tooth five years ago.

Someone will buy it for exactly what he was doing with it, but it won't go for much money.

Only thing worse than cars for depreciation is server hardware.
Click to expand...
::yeahthat::

I'd donate it, or sell it on craigslist. AWS is relatively inexpensive for just playing around and learning.. VMware up til recently was giving away 300 bucks in credit for vCloud air. For a home lab, the intel NUC with an i7 and a decent amount of memory will run ESX quite nicely.
 
Craigs List it! Keep the price low to move it quick! You can build a low power server and experiment with that instead of an enterprise rig. The electricity bill will thank you.

Here is the hardware I am looking to upgrade my home server with as soon as I can find the time. http://www.htpcbeginner.com/htpc-nas-combo-build-2016/
 
Make it into a killer media server.
 
I have an IBM xSeries 455 languishing around and suffering the same fate. 4 processors expandable to 54gb RAM (or 16 processors / 224gb if interconnected). I think we picked up about 20 Itanium2 processors sitting around in a box but can't install them, as we need VRMs and heat sinks to match.

We bought it for $1200 at one time (original list price $30K), then traded it for a Sony Vaio Laptop, then bought it back for $300.

It expects to be in a 60 degree datacenter, so the fans run in overdrive and its loud and noisy, and takes forever to boot up off of EFI. We've put Centos Linux on it and Windows Datacenter, but never used it for a single thing. It just generates too much heat, makes too much noise, and is useless for anything but a webserver (and not good at that, since it uses Itanium 2's).

Instead I run my webserver on an HP 5135 thinclient box (about the size of two paperback books) which is entirely solid state with no moving parts. Microcore/Tiny Core Linux, 400 mghz, 64gb USB stick, and a whopping 110mb of RAM (128mb - video ram). It's been running for the last 10 years drawing 8 watts... about as much as a night light.

I've been thinking of moving it to an Alphawise H96 Pro+ android tv box, but the one I have gets really hot with 8 cores and 3gb RAM... and there seem to be no good webserver ports of Apache to Android yet.

Surprisingly, for a while, I ran our webserver on a Riocar2 MPEG... linux car head unit audio player.

It would be nice if I could load this big old box up with RAM and put it on the internet and offer free shell accounts, but I just don't trust the public on the internet anymore, and there just seems to be not much of a demand for unix shell accounts with the vast dumbing down of the net. So like your box, it just sits in a corner as one super heavy power guzzling space heater boat anchor.
 
Last edited:
The problem with rack mount servers in 2U sizes is that they aren't tall enough to make into coffee tables. :)
 
denverpilot said:
The problem with rack mount servers in 2U sizes is that they aren't tall enough to make into coffee tables. :)
Click to expand...

They work if you get enough of them. Or get two, stand them on edge and add a sheet of glass.
 
Enough with the mumbo jumbo. Just blow it up. Be sure to film it.
 
I let my warehouse guys destroy my old server with a forklift. They enjoyed it.
 
Worthless, toss it, if you want to play with a server just launch something on AWS :)

That all said...anyone have a 386 or 486 laying around? I kind of actually need one.
 
sferguson524 said:
eBay?
Click to expand...
People want more then I'm willing to pay for one. Plus shipping costs. They're usually untested. I don't want to pay a premium for something that might not work at all.

There are still some 486 clones rolling out of China that look like a promising way to run DOS. However minimum unit purchase is always like 500 units.
 
jesse said:
Worthless, toss it, if you want to play with a server just launch something on AWS :)

That all said...anyone have a 386 or 486 laying around? I kind of actually need one.
Click to expand...

If you just need a CPU I probably have that, also all kinds of old ISA cards/ram. The big things like the cases/motherboards/etc I got rid of years ago.
 
Make it into a home server?

Music
Live ATC
Videos
Etc

Or sell it
 
jesse said:
Worthless, toss it, if you want to play with a server just launch something on AWS :)

That all said...anyone have a 386 or 486 laying around? I kind of actually need one.
Click to expand...

jesse said:
People want more then I'm willing to pay for one. Plus shipping costs. They're usually untested. I don't want to pay a premium for something that might not work at all.

There are still some 486 clones rolling out of China that look like a promising way to run DOS. However minimum unit purchase is always like 500 units.
Click to expand...

Why go all the way back to 386/486 for DOS? Plenty of later Pentium chips do DOS just fine...? Technically anything sold up through the Win98 era will work. Even Linux dropped support for the pre-"586" chipsets loooong looooong ago in the kernel.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top