Need some help

[Deeb]

Since Fel already gathered all the computer savvy here with his post I thought I'd tap you guys for some ideas.


Ok here's the problem, I recently found the following at a garage sale and got away with it for dirt cheap ... 280 USD ... (Minus the cisco router)




Thats right, now here's my problem.

I have no clue what I wanna do with any of them. So I'm looking for any suggestions (As long as it won't get me arrested) as what to do with them.

Just in case you needed specs, and I because need somewhere to vent my happiness =D

Netfinity 7000 M10
4 x P3 Xeon 550 Mhz
2 gigs of RAM

Netfinity 5500 M20
2 x P3 Xeon 550 Mhz
2 gigs of RAM

2 x Dell Poweredge 2550
2 x 1.13Ghz
2 Gigs of RAM

2 X IBM x330
2 x 1.0GHz
1 Gig of RAM

Gateway 7250r
2 x 700 Mhz
1 Gig of RAM

Yeah they're old, but we're not launching a space shuttle here people ... =D

[Hearly]

actually the space shuttle uses 286's (seriously..)

[Spec8472]

Depends entirely how geeky you are.

If you wanted to, clustering the 1Ghz boxes would make a reasonably decent mini webserver server cluster. Adding the 550's and 700Mhz infront in a clustered memcache, and you've got the makings of a reasonable dev/test environment for clustered apps. The 550+700's would also make a reasonable load/stress-test cell too...

Unfortunately, apart from the RAM and redundancy aspect (now questionable, given the age of said hardware) - 2 low end Core2Duo servers would probably be faster, and would definitely use far less power.

[miraborn]

Wow... Well, you could create a nice loud expensive space heater with all of them running.

Seriously, though, there is a lot you could do given the number of servers. A clustered multi-tiered web environment does seem to be a good idea - you can really play with separating the presentation layer from the application and database layers to create a nice N-Tier setup.

Or if you want to get evil, you could create a complete Windows AD back-end with directory servers, DNS/DHCP, Exchange, etc. But that would be tortuous to develop and you'd need to be pretty masochistic to do that.

If you do application development, you can have a redundant CVS repository hosted on a cluster with a virtualized test environment running multiple VM's on another cluster.

Dunno - I keep thinking about the server rooms I work in and nothing there really makes sense for a home environment.