Last Saturday I bought two server machines and two of the same servers just the cases. The two full servers and one of the cases are Dell Poweredge 6400's. The other case is a Poweredge 4400. All together it cost me $35. I'm pretty happy with that. I got Ubuntu installed on one of them and it is running quite nicely. The specs of the machine have up and running are:

4 Pentium 3 Xeon 700mhz processors
6 Seagate ST318305LC 18gb 10,000 rpm SCSI drives
16 RAM chips each 128mb totaling 2gb
4 mb of video memory
3 310 watt power supplies wired to a parallel board
CD-ROM drive
Floppy disk drive
7 PCI slots
2 SCSI ports in back

Ubuntu runs fairly nice on it. A little laggy but I think that is due to the 4mb of video memory. I have some shots of the machine. Sorry for the blurriness. Hard to keep that steady and manage to maneuver the messy room.

http://db.tt/q0jzOx8

It is getting it's internet through a shared wifi connection with an old headless Dell Inspiron 5100 . Not the best way to do it but all I have right now. I have 3 PCI cards in there that I added. Two USB and a sound card. I have a wireless PCI card but the motherboard does not want to recognize it at all. It's a Linksys WMP54GX. All in all a nice machine.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome

Have you considered running it headless as well and administering it via SSH (with some X forwarding)?

I tried that. I could not get the ports forwarded through the laptop and to the machine. Still trying to figure that out.

You shouldn't need to do any port forwarding as long as the servers and your desktop/laptop are on the same network. SSH runs on port 22 by default, for reference. And you're just not going to stop telling us about those servers, including spamming #cemetech with infolines, are you? Congrats on them.

He's using one of them to share a connection to the other instead of all being on one LAN. It's pretty normal in a big house with fewer wireless cards than computers.

I don't think I could live being solely on a wireless connection; my apartment is wired with gigabit ethernet with two wifi routers, one at either end. Makes the desktops fast and the laptops portable.

Such is life when you don't live in a tiny apartment =P

Ew, Wifi? Yuck. I'm with Kerm on this one.

Oh, I am too....but most people living with their parents don't have the option of drilling holes in the wall to run a few hundred feet of Cat5.


The exception being one of my gaming friends who ran PVC pipe through his floor and down through the ceiling of the living room as a cable conduit.....but his whole family are gamers.

Elfprince, what about just running some Cat6 along the baseboard (Cat6! Neeedz moar gigabit internet!).

Because then I'd need a lot more feet of it, and our bathroom door wouldn't close all the way

You could run it along the cold water pipe. That would avoid the need to punch any new holes in things.

You underestimate the screwed-upedness of my house

So drill some holes

I've run Ethernet cables up to my brother's room for his xbox and PC with no trouble. I just duck-taped them to the side of the stairs and the floor. It was easy.

DShiznit, you didn't "duck-tape" them, you "duct-taped" them. Duct tape is tape for taping ducts (well, ironically, it is not very moisture resistant, so ducts are something it would be bad at taping). Elfprince, I suppose that I am indeed. Regardless, we're getting massively off-topic here. ParkerR, what are you planning to do with these servers other than turn electricity into heat?

Duck is a brand of duct tape, so he still could have Duck taped them

Right, but then he would have been Duck-taping them instead of duck-taping them.