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Old July 1st 06, 10:02 AM posted to alt.sys.pc-clone.compaq.servers
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Default Bar graph display on IMD for Proliants

In article .com,
says...
I sometimes wonder if LC sees the potential, that Linux has, to breathe
new life into this legacy hardware. I am a "hardware" man myself, and
want nothing more than to see the life of these machines extended far
beyond their designers wildest dreams.


That's the way I see it. I have a 1200 and 5500 in the rack running all
my internet stuff. The 1200 is only a 128MB/233MHz machine, but it's
just a firewall, and it does that brilliantly. OK so the internal video
chipset is a bit clunky running kde and Webmin to do the admin stuff,
but hell how often do you fire that bit up and change the configuration
anyway.

It runs shorewall, and is the ntp and rsync server for everything else
on the network, and it just goes.

The 5500 is a quad Xeon400/1GB machine, and it runs as a DMZ hosting
DNS, apache, mysql, php, postfix, ftp, etc. etc. and it just runs
without hiccup. The graphics under kde are nothing to sneeze at though I
will admit I whacked in a spare 3D Rage video card that was lying around
because it was better than the internal one.

To be honest, it wouldn't be any improvement if I had $4000 of new
machines replacing this lot, because even though I wouldn't try loading
XP onto them and launching AutoCAD, what people tend to forget is that
for internet jobs like this, the oldies are just perfect.

The 5500 cost me the grand sum of just $27 (yep that's right, 27
Australian dollars) off ebay, and cosmetically/functionally it's as new.

Where else can you find a quad-pentium machine with a gig of RAM, twin
power supplies, insane amounts of cooling, and bullet-proof RAID 5 scsi
storage for that sort of money?

OK so it takes a few days of hard-drive spinning to build up a Stage 1
Gentoo system from scratch. So what?

I love these old tanks.