The great thing about working in a privately owned shop which has a long history of procuring and selling all kinds of surplus electronics (alongside the mainstay of video games and the like) is that, sometimes, you get to take home the most wild of things.
I’ve previously mentioned a few 2007 iMac’s I got in the classic “take ’em home or throw them away” situation that happens when a store just gets too much old crap. Honestly I figured this would be the last bit of cool stuff to take home for a while. As it turns out, that wouldn’t be the case.
Enter an old Dell PowerEdge 310 rack-mount server. A single 2.4 ghz Xeon processor and 8 Gigabytes of memory. A very filthy rack-mount server, which is missing 3 of the 4 drive sleds, the front security panel, and expansion cards which were once inside of it, but somehow still works. It does happen to have the COA for Windows Server 2008, which is a plus, I guess…
The funny thing is, the thing actually got thrown away — we were doing a massive cleanup this past week and, while I was off, it got tossed in the dumpster. Honestly, I figured we were going to use the thing at some point, otherwise I would have taken it home sooner. Needless to say, I went back out there and got it. I didn’t need it, but at no cost to me, why not? We just wanted to have the space in the shop for something else.
The funny thing is, I could have taken it forever ago and never knew that, and at some point the other 3 hard drive sleds were removed for their hard drives, the 4th one only being left since its hard drive was dead. I’m going to see if we can find the sleds, but if not, no big — I can always get more.
As for the dead hard drive, I replaced that with a 1TB 2.5 inch server grade drive that I bought from work after we accidentally ordered it for a PlayStation 4 repair but couldn’t use since it’s a physically taller drive than the average laptop style 2.5 inch.
Now, as the title gets at, just what in the hell am I actually going to do with this thing? The answer is I don’t know. Servers like this use a good chunk of power, in the 100-200 watt an hour range depending on what’s going on. That’s a cost I’d rather not take on for something that I’m not doing anything with.
It’s one thing to use a Mac mini as a basic file server, but it’s another to have a 4 bay full-power rack mount server sitting somewhere in your house, whirring away (seriously, these things can get loud) but I also can’t miss the chance to mess around with actual server hardware and learn the ins and outs of “server” stuff, on real hardware.
That’s about that. I’m actually messing with it as I type this, trying different Linux distributions (Ubuntu Server, of all things, didn’t go so well — I may try again after I read up on it more) and seeing what will work for how I want to use the hardware.
I guess I’ll be sharing updates on this project from time to time, hopefully. More to come, as always.