Just picked up two of these 490s from my school for $25 a piece with one 1.86GHz Xeon E5320 in each and 6GB of DDR2 ECC combined. I'll add some pictures here at some point...
The current plan is to combine them into one chassis (easy) and turn that into a VM server for security lab testing. I'll probably be using CentOS and learn KVM for the machines. The fun part will be learning how to turn this into a pseudo-NAS and making everything work.
In the near future, I'll probably buy some Ebay RAM and throw that in there with a small solid state boot drive and a couple of storage drives for music, movies, TV, and the aforementioned VMs. I currently have a few hard drives laying around that I can use, but I would rather have some decent NAS drives instead of regular desktop drives that may crap out on me rather quickly.
If anyone has any ideas, feel free to make suggestions as to what I should look into doing with this.
EDIT: Moved to build logs because this will end up being more of a log than anything else
Idk if the motherboard in those desktops supports a better xeon, but if it does, I would pickup a couple of cheapo quad core. Lga 771 xeon's off of eBay. The dual cores that the newegg page has listed as standard are really not packing tons of compute power. I would see if quad's are feasible.
The ones I picked up weren't exactly the ones linked on newegg. They came with the e5320, which is a quad core at 1.86GHz. I may pick up some higher clocked quad cores down the road, but for now everything is working fine with 8 cores in CentOS.
I'll probably order 32 gigs this week. The ram slots are a bit dusty from the school never cleaning the towers out but canned/compressed air is a wonderful thing.
Yeah I made sure they came with quads before buying. If they didn't, I would've just bought all the parts on eBay to put it together in my old E-ATX case.
Here's the case of what I picked up two days ago. I have another that I yanked the extra parts out of.
Case I ripped the extra parts out of.
The internals from day 1 all put together.
Dropped the HDD cage down and snapped it together. It appears it acts as a shroud for airflow mostly.
Day 2:
Pulled out the extra ribbon cables and the surprisingly modular power supply cables to clean up the rat's nest. Good on Dell for using a somewhat modular design for their 2006 workstations.
I thought these were the only 3 sata connections on the board and was planning around that...
But then I found these after cleaning up the rat's nest up top. Guess I can have 5 drives.. Too bad they're only sata 2 at 3Gb/s, but I'm not complaining for what I paid.
Also added a fan from the other case to help with airflow through the sectioned off CPU and ram bay.
And the back with the ghetto mount that works.. The fan barely fits in there if you can't tell.
I think that's about it for hardware besides upgrading the drives, adding more ram, and maybe a couple of expansion cards. I'll update with the software at some point here when I get a chance after finals week.
