Old servers as desktops (or other creations)

N

nbittech

How many of you guys out there recycle old servers (or whatever else) as desktops? The hardware quality is miles ahead of most consumer-grade desktops, but when you use something for a purpose that it wasn't intended, it can be a rocky road to travel. But the results can be very interesting.

I have my own IT consulting/PC repair/anything it takes to make money in a small town, business, and I had been searching for a good all-purpose rig for my shop. I needed a machine that does everything imaginable, a sort of PC Swiss-Army-Knife if you will, I got to thinking, and this is what I did...


Dell PowerEdge 2900 gen-2

2x 3.2ghz Xeon dual-cores, basically Pentium-D Extremes labeled as Xeons
12gb of DDR2 RAM
4x 500gb 7200rpm SATA drives in RAID 1+0 (1tb capacity) on a PERC 5i controller
an old Creative X-FI "Fatality" edition sound card (has to fix a PCI-X slot)
a nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS video card that I cut to fit an 8x pci-e slot (really works)
dual gigabit ethernet ports (bridged)
Windows 7 Pro 64 (with a FreeBSD VM in VirtualBox of course)
lots of spliced wires to power all this stuff


I literally cut the connector on the video card down to half its length to fit in an 8x/4x slot, and it works perfectly (at 8x of course.) I also found that my sound card choices were limited because of the faster PCI slots that servers use. I used a USB sound card at first.

I also realized that I had to splice a lot of wires to power the video and sound card, as servers aren't exactly bristling with Molex connectors.

The disks are standard 500gb 7200 SATA drives, available anywhere. RAID 10 is awesome but expensive. I never have to worry about losing data though. I can always add two more pares of them when they fill up.

Sometimes I get some weird errors once in a while, but it always works itself out.

All of the drivers for Server 2008 R2 work fine for Windows 7.

It's not without its drawbacks however. This thing makes my shop quite warm, and it sounds like a jet airplane taking off as well, so I wouldn't recommend this for your house.

But it will handle anything I throw at it. It even plays most newer games well. The 8800 GTS is an older video card, but it still rocks. I just couldn't bring myself to cut up a brand new $300 video card.

I have 2 cpus, so I can dedicate an entire cpu to my FreeBSD VM!!!

Hopefully the pair of Harpertown quad-cores I ordered off eBay will be here soon. That should be a big improvement. However even with the two dual-cores my Windows 7 cpu score is a 7.0! My old Phenom X4 desktop has the same score.

I just wanted to put this out there for everyone as this is a cheap and easy solution for those of us that need a reliable development machine or even a gaming rig. It's rather hot and loud. But the reliability is far greater than a typical desktop.

On an ending note I also have and old SunFire v880 (2x 750 UltraSparc IIIs) running FreeBSD that is basically a novelty (as well as an very expensive space-heater and a very heavy table.) It's fun to play with every once in a while. But I can barely talk over it when it's running, so I don't fire it up much nowadays except to show people. Maybe some day I will find a better use for it. FreeBSD works great on older Sparcs, I even have X on it.

I have also made servers out of desktops too, but with nowhere near as good of results.

Before the flaming and trolling starts, I am very aware that this isn't necessarily a good idea (specific hardware is designed for a specific purpose and driver and BIOS issues are going to occur.)

I will also add that FreeBSD is a Swiss-Army-Knife of an OS, an the possibilities are only limited to ones imagination.

So I have started this thread for other people to share their Frankenstein creations.

Happy modding.
 
There are so many uses for random things that you wouldn't normally re-use, failed hard drives have strong magnets that will hold anything up on a fridge, SCSI hard drives and RAID cards are cheap nowadays and make great upgrades for older desktops, old PIII boxes and wireless cards make great routers, old P4-Pentium-m laptops make fun toys for kids when you add Linux/BSD and games and emulators, an old UPS and a car battery is nice during a power outage (will run a tv, radio, or lamp), old smart phones with wifi have infinite possibilities (basically mini tablets), old power supplies are 12v, and will test and power car stereos.
 
Here I was thinking I am lucky to get old desktops to turn into servers...

FWIW:

Old, preferably business grade, laptops make good test servers here; even with degraded batteries they've got 'UPS' on board. My latest creation has a non-working LCD and the keyboard unmounted to vent heat, but it hosts a slew of jails quite nicely. I appreciate that these little beasties don't make the racket of the heavier gear.
 
ab said:
Here I was thinking I am lucky to get old desktops to turn into servers...
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Exactly. I have occasionally had the chance to cheaply (or sometimes even for free) get my hands on workstations (HP, SGI, DEC, Sun, that sort of thing) that had been written off by universities. As workstations they usually really didn't cut it anymore, but they made good servers. I typically ran NetBSD on them, because it was often the only thing besides the original OS that would run on them anyway.
 
The Sunblades can run as a Desktop while you jail services.
If you need redundancy, PowerMacs can make good servers.

Either way, recycling systems saves you money and shows off your nerdy skills.
 
Spend the money on a half decent portable machine of similar speed and I'm sure it will pay for itself in 12 months via reduced power consumption (say, 10-20 watts on average vs 200-300 plus) - in addition to taking up far less space - and being portable!

The PowerEdge 2900 you list above would be handily outperformed by a typical modern Core i5 15" notebook with discrete graphics, with far lower power consumption, a warranty and cheaper memory. In particular, the modern machine will absolutely MURDER the old Xeons in AES, video transcoding, etc - due to the dedicated hardware for those purposes.

Be aware the Windows "CPU" rating is very simplistic and does not take advanced hardware instructions into account.


If you don't pay for power (and air conditioning to get rid of the heat generated :)), and can stand the jet turbine noise when the machine is under load, and don't mind dedicating most of your desk to a rack mount machine, go for it I guess... just don't assume it will save you money or perform better for cheap :)

This isn't intended to be a flame - I considered doing similar myself. It just doesn't really add up.

I'd only really consider an old rack mount machine a a desktop via remote desktop session (RDP, X11, whatever) as the noise alone is just way too bad.

2c.
 
nbittech said:
I also realized that I had to splice a lot of wires to power the video and sound card, as servers aren't exactly bristling with Molex connectors.
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Might be worth checking the rating on the power supply and ensure you're not overloading it. There's lots of power supply sizing calculators available online. You'd hate to burn that power supply out, especially if it doesn't use standard connectors for the motherboard.

nbittech said:
I have also made servers out of desktops too, but with nowhere near as good of results.
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I once worked at a mom-and-pop dial-up/web-hosting ISP and EVERYTHING was running off desktop/consumer hardware. We had an entire shelf with dozens of external 56k modems and a rats nest of wires. But it was surprisingly stable; very little in the way of crashes and we rarely had to reboot anything. Maybe we were just lucky.
 
leth said:
I once worked at a mom-and-pop dial-up/web-hosting ISP and EVERYTHING was running off desktop/consumer hardware. We had an entire shelf with dozens of external 56k modems and a rats nest of wires. But it was surprisingly stable; very little in the way of crashes and we rarely had to reboot anything. Maybe we were just lucky.
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Ditto, I suspect many small dial up ISPs started out with kit like that.

The one I started out with had a little Netra for authentication/SMTP/POP, then we decided we needed a proxy server, so put in a squid box using desktop hardware (and Linux - I think Redhat 4 back in the day? Later we moved to Debian Sid in the late 90s). Then SMTP and POP got moved off the original box as load increased too, again using desktop class hardware.

Dodgy? Yes (again, as above - pretty stable though!). I'm talking back in 1994-1996 for say 30 dial in lines. ISP margins aren't/weren't great back then.


We at least started out with a Livingston Portmaster and a shelf of rack mount Netcomm 28.8k modems, later moved to an AS5200 and then AS5300 Cisco 56k dial in servers. The move to digital was awesome. 1 Cat5 cable for 30 lines (E1 PRI) - versus 1 serial cable back to the Portmaster + 1 punch down PSTN line per modem :)
 
throAU said:
We at least started out with a Livingston Portmaster and a shelf of rack mount Netcomm 28.8k modems, later moved to an AS5200 and then AS5300 Cisco 56k dial in servers. The move to digital was awesome. 1 Cat5 cable for 30 lines (E1 PRI) - versus 1 serial cable back to the Portmaster + 1 punch down PSTN line per modem :)
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Portmaster! That was the name of it. We had a few of those running all the modems. I took one home when the ISP went belly-up but never managed to find a real use for it. It eventually found it's way to the electronics recycling depot a few years ago.
 
Server class machines suck up considerably more power than desktop machines because they are designed to be on 24/7. If you care about your electricity bill I wouldn't recommend using them for desktops.
 
One has to choose where to spend $$$$ on a consumer grade new laptop that may die soon after warranty expiration, or on electricity bills to run 24/7 old server(s) that came for free.
I was given a file cabinet sized Transtec 2400 server, containing a SuperMicro 370-DE6 motherboard, dual PIII-933, 1GB, dual U160 SCSI onboard, two hotplug power supplies, lots of drive bays and front panel LEDs for disks. I added a gigabit NIC, quad SATA PCI-64 adapter and four 1TB drives to make a NAS.
Can ZFS be tuned for safe operation on i386 with such low memory, or should I switch to another geom filesystem?
 
I don't recommend ZFS on i386. It can take quite some tuning and there are some gotchas like memory fragmentation of kernel memory if the system is up for extended periods that causes a kernel panic when the memory becomes too fragmented. Amd64 does not suffer from this problem.
 
sounds like a jet airplane taking off
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Here too. I can understand why marketing folks use terms like "whisper quiet". Next time I'll pay more attention to decibels and sound pressure levels, something more concrete and absolute anyway.
 
don't waste power and time

Ancient servers with pre-DDR2 memory are too slow to build world or any large port. They can only be used as spare workstations with lightweight X desktop environment or trimmed Windows XP.
 
throAU said:
The PowerEdge 2900 you list above would be handily outperformed by a typical modern Core i5 15" notebook with discrete graphics, with far lower power consumption, a warranty and cheaper memory. In particular, the modern machine will absolutely MURDER the old Xeons in AES, video transcoding, etc - due to the dedicated hardware for those purposes.
[...]
If you don't pay for power (and air conditioning to get rid of the heat generated :)), and can stand the jet turbine noise when the machine is under load, and don't mind dedicating most of your desk to a rack mount machine, go for it I guess... just don't assume it will save you money or perform better for cheap :)
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...while at the same time that laptop CPU is probably outperformed by the older xeon in everything other then video transcoding and AES, especially when it comes to being under load for some time (where the laptop overheats), high reliability (ECC, better HDDs, a.s.o.) and/or MTBF. At least over here, Sandybridge E5 configurations outperform Laptop Sandybridge i5 ones by an order of magnitude when it comes to content provision, large number of independend IO (KDE has quite a number of apps that can bring most systems to their limits even if used by only one user) or ports building (I won't say running large ZFS setups or virtualization because that isn't possible with a laptop to begin with), and as far as I can remember this relation is not new.

What I'm trying to imply is: use the right system for the right job. Everything can be used as a desktop workstation but you wouldn't carry around a 30kg box without a screen and call it mobile nor use a server with a low lifetime expectancy that can't take load and call it economic.
 
xibo said:
...while at the same time that laptop CPU is probably outperformed by the older xeon in everything other then video transcoding and AES, especially when it comes to being under load for some time (where the laptop overheats), high reliability (ECC, better HDDs, a.s.o.) and/or MTBF.
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Funny then how the 2011 Macbooks were comparable to the quad core 2010 Mac Pros in CPU benchmarks when they were released. Except for stuff like AES, in which they were 20-30x faster. Is your "free" server hardware 2010 vintage or newer?

My Macbook runs 3d games for 12 hours at a time and has never had a failure due to overheating.

You, my friend are making things up about crashing under load due to heat - if you're seeing that on the NEW machine you could buy with the power bill savings, you RMA it as defective and move on. If you see crashes with your free server hardware, you need to diagnose and purchase replacement parts yourself.

I'll grant you ECC and RAID are nice to have, but are they worth the noise, power consumption and cost to replace with out-of-warranty server hardware? How's the price on those 1 TB SAS drives? Oh, wait... you mean you're running SATA to get the space? Like desktop/laptop hardware then?

Is your UPS free as well? How's the uptime when you lose power? My portable machine gets 5-7 hours... :)


At least over here, Sandybridge E5 configurations outperform Laptop Sandybridge i5 ones by an order of magnitude
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You are comparing current Xeon (Sandy Bridge Xeon hasn't been out for anywhere near 12 months yet and is still CURRENT) vs. 2 year old Laptop CPU, which wasn't the original comparison. The original comparison was "old" and "free" server hardware vs. my assertion that buying a new laptop will be cheaper due to paying for itself in reduced power consumption over a few months (let's be pessimistic, and say 1 year).

p.s. My laptop is my test lab. You can (and I do) run virtual machines on a laptop. I simulate entire networks on it using either Fusion or Virtualbox and GNS3. Multiple client/server operating systems, multiple Cisco routers, Cisco Call Manager, etc.

I think you severely under-estimate the power of mobile hardware these days.
 
I know this is an old thread. I'm putting in my couple of shekels worth. One of the great things about FreeBSD is that if you can easily repurpose old good working hardware. I've had a FreeBSD computing cluster consisting of ALR Revolution 2X(L) servers and home built machines based on Abit BP6 (yes, the dual Celeron boards). It was a fun home built lab to tinker with. I also dinked around with FDDI. FDDI EISA and PCI NICs were dirt cheap on eBay in addition to 100BTX.

I've taken an old i430VX system back in 2000 with a P5-75 CPU, dropped a second NIC in it and it you have a firewall and router. It didn't need much to get the job done. It had a small hard drive, I don't remember what size. I just dropped FreeBSD 3.5 or 4.1 on it, configured the kernel to the bare minimum for a dedicated firewall/router and just monitored it for attempted security breaches. I don't think I had the maximum cacheable memory on that old beater of a system.

If you're running older legacy 32-bit i386 hardware, you may have to use an EOL release. The nice thing is that you can still obtain EOL releases if you need them.
 
I think that YMMV depending on the task. If you want to use hardware that old, it may not run stuff that is up to date and up to snuff. It is not recommended to run ZFS on a 32-bit i386 arch. Not impossible to use i386 to run Apache or Nginx or some other mini-web server, but today's demands may be more than old hardware can handle. For example, web browsers take an inordinate amount of RAM - in the days of i386 4 GB of RAM was considered server-grade. But these days, it's not unusual for Firefox to eat 6 GB of RAM or more.
 
astyle said:
in the days of i386 4 GB of RAM was considered server-grade. But these days, it's not unusual for Firefox to eat 6 GB of RAM or more.
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I certainly can't disagree with that. We now live in a 64-bit physical address space which means if you're running something below 16 GB RAM you may have major issues. I won't have a system below 16 GB RAM. 16 GB RAM pretty much is the bottom line these days in the 64-bit world.
 
I'm presently running Firefox on a laptop with 8 GB RAM & 16 GB swap partitions. No problem here. My HP laptop has only 2 GB RAM and still runs Firefox surprisingly well and usually very briskly. It probably helps to stay off Facebook and the porn sites.

If you're concerned about the cost of electricity, you might also like to consider using on-grid solar power systems, or off-grid systems using LiFePO4 batteries, to make your own electricity. It's a great option which is well-researched and comes highly recommended. Even very small solar panel systems can more than offset the costs of using older, less power-efficient computer hardware and other appliances. Given a few years of supplying the grid with more electricity than you use, you can also start enjoying very decent returns on your investments, in the form of checks from the power companies, depending on where you live.

Socially responsible computer users and companies might also wish to consider the greater and more well-hidden environmental costs of manufacturing new computers. When you factor in costs like the depletion and landfilling of natural resources, plus the real environmental costs of carbon emissions incurred via the manufacturing processes, the total "true costs" of rapidly and continuously producing and consuming new computers is actually quite a bit higher than the retail prices now being charged for them.

www.greenbiz.com

The true cost of personal computers | GreenBiz

Computer, laptops and tablets continue to grow rapidly in the global marketplace. Is it sustainable? We calculated the environmental costs of computers compared to their purchase price.
www.greenbiz.com www.greenbiz.com

It's all about the money, you know. Younger people have much more to lose by ignoring these long-term costs than old farts like me do. Older farts than me have handed these problems off to my generation, and now, greedy selfish bastards that we are, we're gradually dying off too, and handing those same problems over to younger people and their progeny. Meanwhile, the problems keep getting worse, more urgent, and more immediate. Sorry and good luck with that.
 
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