[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 @ 12:10 -0500, Lionel Peterson said:

> >From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
> >Date: Wed Jun 14 09:28:31 CDT 2006
> >To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> >Subject: Re: [geeks] value of PIII PC servers
> 
> >My plans may have changed a bit.  I got a U2 with 1GB RAM and 2 300MHz
> >CPUs for $40 today.  Will cost $40 to ship it, but I can live with that.
> >Shipping always you.
> 
> That is a pretty good deal - makes me think my U2s are approaching $0
> in value...

Yeah... I got the item by making a "best offer" on ebay.  He wanted $126
the machines he is selling, so I offered $40 on a whim.

Who knows, he might be having trouble getting rid of them, and I could
have offered even less.

It occurs to me that I could probably turn around and sell the CPUs and
memory for a decent profit.

> I suspect this is out of your price range, but I found (what I think)
> is a pretty good deal on eBay - a dual Opteron 246 system (two 2 GHz
> CPU cores) on a Tyan MB w/1 Gig RAM in a Supermicro workstation case
> with 4 SATA hotswap trays for $759 + $20 S/H. I'm not familiar with
> Opterons in any meaningful way, but this seems like a decent deal,
> since:

Not a bad deal as long as it is a good motherboard and case.

But yeah, out of my price range right now.  I'm just trying to get my
servers running again.  Two died in the last year, and the two remaining
Suns are old and need to be retired.

I *might* use the Ultra 1/170, but mainly it would just replace the SS5
for email and DNS duties.  So far, I have not found it to be much faster
than my SS5, and I was under the impression that it should be quite a
bit faster.

It is a U1 Enterprise with 170MHz CPU and 640MB of RAM.  I could
probably sell off the RAM for more than it is worth.

> I need to build up a reasonably beefy Linux server for a project I'm
> just starting, it's going to be built on an Ubuntu 6.0.6 "LAMP Server"
> installation...

I downloaded Ubuntu or Kubuntu today to play with.

I generally shy away from stuff like that, having used Slackware for 12+
years now, but thought maybe I'd take a look.

One thing I have to admit is that while I like Slackware's BSD
orientation and other aspects, it does take me longer to maintain it for
desktop use than the others.

Then again, my setup is fairly custom, and laziness alone might keep me
from moving.

I have Slackware running a very custom kernel and the whole thing is
sitting on LVM and RAID.  In fact, the install does not support this at
all.  I have to do a two-stage install: once to a separate drive or
partition, then use that install to set up LVM and RAID, and then move
the install to the LVM devices.

It's not Linux's fault of course, it is a limitation of the Slackware
installer.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["All of us get lost in the darkness,
dreamers turn to look at the stars" -- Rush ]