Alright so today I stopped by a computer service store that was just loaded with stuff, and I know the owner through some mutual friends. Long story short, I now have 3 old Xeon systems, an HP 12 bay SATA SAN, 9 SATA HDD’s, and 8 SCSI HDD’s. Oh, and did I forget to mention it was all free :D? Anyway, I booted up the first system tonight with Linux Mint, and it is running with a Xeon E5410 quad core @ 2.33 GHz, and it has one other unused CPU slot. I am still fairly new with Linux and bash, but the whole reason I kept all this stuff was so I could learn more anyway. So, my question for you guys is what projects should I dive into with all this newly acquired equipment? I am open for any suggestions, and @wendell, your expertise would be greatly appreciated.
Update: The other server in use is an old Dell PowerEdge 2850
How big are the drives, what are you willing to spend to make it work, and how close are you to where the machine will be setup? I ask this because you could grab some cheap 10Gb Nic's off of eBay along with a cheaper copper cable:
Most of the drives are 40-80G. Setup wont really be a problem because it's just going to be in my room. The NICs won't be any problem, but I still need to buy the trays because I only have one that was included
Server equipment is no different from regular equipment when you take a step back. It always boils down to what do you want to learn?
If you are looking at setting up services like Apache, Nginx, Sendmail, postfix, MySQL, Headless game services, Jabber servers, VPN server, Firewall. This list goes on.
To be honest, setting up any of those services sounds really interesting. I'm still a high school student so really I'm open to try pretty much anything.
Last time i checked GNU Hurd project sill looks for kernel developers....
Well High school students get spied on by there schools these days. So i would suggest to make the VPN so you can encrypt your data between your laptop and home and you can use your home server to get on they internet.
Sounds like a cool project that I will be doing here in the very new future. However, I do not know much about kernel development, but I would like to learn.
VPN server. And working on learning kernel development with help from kernelnewbies.com. It may take a while however, school is starting and I will have an extremely busy year this year. I am trying to get into the Turing honors program at University of Texas at Austin, and it is quite difficult to get into.
Nice. Well GNU Hurd is good project to even read about then. Its a kernel in development for almost 30 years, but they aimed on a too difficult architect type that slowed them down in debugging and took them years and it's code is open, but success with the honor program, getting in is hard but when your in its a good place to be.