Server given to me, tell me what I can do with it!

[shu82]

I just got a server given to me and I have no idea what I want to do with it. The guy thought I would have a better idea of how to use it. I really don't but I took it anyway. Here is the specs:

Dual 700 P3s
6 18gb scsi drives
1gb ram

This thing is huge and I have a whole box of extra drives, power supplies

I have never set up a website or a fileserver or anything. Any ideas on what to do and guides on how to do it?

Thanks

 

[NotFound]

Host my personal website?


...seriously? lol

 

[angelneo]

I am assuming you are not putting your server in a data centre? If you are just going to run it off your home internet connection, you might need to use some service such as no-ip.com

Other than that, you need to choose the OS your server is going to run on. I would think linux would be your best choice for you to start with. Most flavour of linux comes with install options of all the necessary app (such as apache, sendmail, proftpd etc so on) to run a server. I think you can find some tutorial or guide to help you with it on google. It can be quite frustrating but fulfilling once you managed to get it set up.

 

[G5Unit]

Host a Mac related forum on it! We can NEVER have enough of those!

 

[jeremy.king]

Sounds like my old Netfinity server...When I finally shut it down, I saved almost $20/month in electricity

Seriously, if you don't know what to do with it, donate it to a church or school.

 

[odaiwai]

Play with Linux.

For enterprise hardware like that, Linux will just work with almost everything on it. Especially if it's HP/Compaq, but just about everything on an older server platform will be a solved problem with Linux.

You could set it up as a Samba or NFS fileserver pretty easily: but you might want to set up the drives as raid 0 or 1, rather than Raid 5 or 6. (i.e., only one or two copies of your data, rather than multiple redundancies, but everything's there three or more times.) (I find OSX is better with NFS shares than SMB shares.)

You could install Linux on one of the drives and use the rest as a ZFS partition, just to see what Leopard's new FS will be like!

If it's a 4U box (4 units high), you could probably stick a PCI SATA card or two in it, and have 4 300GB SATA drives in place of some of the SCSIs, giving you a Terabyte+ RAID. This might require some bodgery with cables, but should be a good learning experience.

If it's serious server hardware of the PIII vintage, it's probably noisy as all heck and sucks power like you wouldn't believe.

 

[miniConvert]

Is it incredibly loud? Most servers are, they're designed for datacentres.

Could be fun to have a play with it, see what's on there (if anything), experiment with various settings etc...

...but at the end of the day, for small-scale use and learning you'd be better off just installing Linux or whatever on something smaller. Once you're done playing it might be best to pass it on to somebody else unless you decide to use it for hosting something.

 

[shu82]

My dell is fried and I still have my old hard drives in it. So I may want to buy an ata card and mount them The scsi drives are 10K rpm so I want to keep maybe 4. I thought about it and I would like to host my friends band's site. But I would like to figure out a way to have the TB of divx stuf at my fingertips at all times without providing it out to the whole world. It is an HP btw. It is loud and the guy who gave it to me said it costs 30/mo to run.

Will my 3.0 DSL be enough to bandwidth for page, music and video serving?

 

[Fleetwood Mac]

Perhaps, but its likely against your ISPs rules (TOS/AUP).

 

[RedTomato]

I have a G3 which I was using as a home server, but don't any more, so I speak from experience.

Basically, use it to learn on. Don't think about leaving it on all the time. When you've learnt what you can, give it to someone else.

Your web uplink is unlikely to be enough to make it feasible to host your own website.

30 a month in electricity is horrendous, especially over a year - it will double your bills or more, and isn't good for the environment.

It's worth trying out for a couple of months, especially in the winter when it'll help heat the house. After that, you'll realise that you never actually use its functions more than a couple times a week, if that. Plus it's not good for the health to have hot circuit boards giving off chemicals and gases in your own home.

It's worth using as a raid backup, but leave it switched off when you're not using it - just do a backup once a week or once a month.

Another use is as a Myth TV backend. It's well worth learning how to set up Myth, but again, don't aim to have it on 24/7, just turn it on for recording or watching.

hope that's some reasoned advice.

xoxo T