What would you do with a dual Xeon server at home?

[Turtle530]

New user here, been lurking for some time. Well I just got the chance to pick up a HP/Compaq ML530 server for $60. Not a bad deal, it has dual 800MHX Xeon processors, 768meg of ram, DLT tape, and 5 drives and all the original software including NT 4.0 server. Now I've got a couple of machines but honestly I'm not quite sure what to do with this beast. Any ideas? I'm up for anything that you can think of. Also any idea how well it would run Seti? Appreciate your ideas/filling me in/giving me a clue. Thanks - Turtle

 

[Powermoloch]

Originally posted by: Turtle530
New user here, been lurking for some time. Well I just got the chance to pick up a HP/Compaq ML530 server for $60. Not a bad deal, it has dual 800MHX Xeon processors, 768meg of ram, DLT tape, and 5 drives and all the original software including NT 4.0 server. Now I've got a couple of machines but honestly I'm not quite sure what to do with this beast. Any ideas? I'm up for anything that you can think of. Also any idea how well it would run Seti? Appreciate your ideas/filling me in/giving me a clue. Thanks - Turtle

you lucky SOB......If it is like that, for me that is. I would use it as a multimedia machine to do some 3d rendering (light) ,also Photoshop and stuff...

 

[Lonyo]

Serve music/video to your other home PC(s)?
Internet gateway?
Storage box (especially with tape drives)?
General net use/work applications?

 

[EatSpam]

I wouldn't bother with the Dual Xeon you are getting, but if I had a dual Xeon server at home, it'd be doing the same thing the P4 box is doing - sitting there with an assload of RAM, running Virtual Machines. Although, the P4 could really use another 2 gig of RAM...

 

[natto fire]

distributed computing, and running dedicated game servers. I would ditch the NT4 and get Gentoo on that puppy, though.

 

[Vegito]

great price.. where did you find that..

 

[Turtle530]

I ended up getting it at work. They were doing a big sell off of a bunch of stuff, I bought a leather office chair and at the last minute I decided to put a low bid on one of the 5 servers they were dumping. I never thought I'd get it for that price but low and behold it happened.

Now I have to figure out what to do with it, it's cool but the wife keeps looking at the size and frowns. Now if I could find something cool to do with it she wouldn't complain. She loves to do video editing and makes her own DVD videos with our vacation photos so the editing idea was good. Keep the ideas coming! Thanks - Turtle

 

[Umberger]

more granny pr0n than you can shake a stick at....

...but seriously, I'd use it for storage and rendering, and just let seti (or something of the sort) go in the background.

 

[imported_Tick]

Beowulf/render farm?

 

[redhatlinux]

I'd look to make some $$'s and try to sell the beast to a small business. I bought a couple of servers from a leasing company a while back. Didn't get as good a deal as you. If you don't do that, make yourself a small business and find a way to up the value of the asset going into the business. I have a couple of business's registered in Missouri, pretty simple, go to Court House, fill out a form, didn't cost a dime. With Dell offering Celeron Desktops for less than $300.00, you could put together a pretty slick, small business package, including your server for next to nothing. Dell will finance the Celerons, even special deal for small business. You just have to make some $$$s to afford the latest toys.

 

[DarkKnight69]

Folding @ Home!!!!