What should I do with a free Xeon?

Hello, new here, so apologies for any faux pas.
I’ve recently been given a very powerful rig and am struggling to find something I want to do with it. The machine in question:

  • Precision Tower 5810
  • Xeon E5-2687W v4
  • Quadro P1000
  • 32GB RAM

I don’t really have a need to use it as a workstation, don’t do pc gaming, and Currently it’s sitting in my garage mining crypto, mainly as a stress/thermal test. I’ll probably pull the GPU out since a headless box doesn’t need it. All my “home server” use cases are mostly covered by my existing synology NAS so it’s not like there’s an immediate need I can see it filling, besides “home lab”.
What should I do with it? Does anyone have any interesting ideas?

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If you don’t have any interest in doing VM , Data solutions.
Why don’t you look at donating it to a local school where a poor student might be able to learn on it?

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I was thinking something similar, donations for learning to a local school would be a great option :wink:

Is there a type of organization that could utilize it well? I’m within range of some elementary/middle/high school but I think a community college or something would make more sense.
I’ve also thought of giving it to my church. I do like the idea of setting up a “home server” for them, maybe saving them some money and hosting things like a website or matrix server in-house. Might be more trouble than it’s worth though.

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I don’t know how in practice you would do it, but maybe you can launch a couple of VMs and use/give them to open source projects to run build/test servers on it ?
Or you can stress it when projects such as Folding@home instead of crypto currency

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That’s a really neat idea! Coming from a anti-social shut-in i have to say the idea of offering a few hours to your local church might also open you doors to your local community of store owners etc no?

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See if there’s a nerdy kid there, give them the server and have them manage the site instead of you?

When I was in college, the CS department had this little cart with four random machines in a self contained network that all got repeatedly destroyed and reimaged. The box might be a good fit for that also if there’s a school near you which could use something like that.

Welcome to the forum!

Albeit overkill, you could use it as your backup to the data in the NAS. Give it to a friend / neighbor a few blocks away (or a family member farther away, cities or counties if you can) and use Restic to backup your data (and the person on the other end using Restic to backup their data to your NAS). Well, technically you could achieve that with built-in Synology software, but eh, you don’t have a second Synology box.

The only things that come to mind are home labs (I’m currently looking into LXD and Kubernetes) and hosting services for your local community (a mail server, a simple chat software like Rocket.Chat or the better Matrix + video conference software Jitsi, etc.).

Also, mining crypto is a good enough reason to use it. If you don’t like money, you could join the Level1 folding@home team and help scientists and who knows what glow-in-the-darks to do intensive compute stuff, like literally bruteforcing all possibilities on how proteins fold (and probably passwords).

The above small text is sarcasm, just in case any alphabet boyz are reading this.

Wow, all great options.
@oliverbm that seems much more complex in practice than it does in theory. I’d also basically be exposing my home network to some degree. Could reverse-proxy it through a VPS though. I like the idea.
@redocbew I’ll have to see if there is a more “nerdy kid” than me; I tend to climb to the top of that list no matter which room I’m in (I assume most of us here do).
(at)Biky I’ve thought of actually buying a second synology to stick at my parents’ house for that purpose, as this box consumes way more power and is much larger than I’d like a NAS to be. I’m not hurting for cash but don’t have any to burn either, though many would point out the cryptomining says the opposite. This is a decent idea though.

I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of hosting a mail server but Matrix/Jitsi are both about as useful and much easier to set up.
(new users can only mention 2 users in a post. Interesting limitation.)

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Mail isn’t too hard to host, but I guess going with something existent is less of a pain. The reason why I didn’t host a Matrix server yet is because it was asking for a mail server (I could have used Google or whatever else, but I decided to go full self-hosted).

You could offer it as a build server to some opensource projects.
You could build android/chromium in just hours instead of years.
You could start to offer hosting for other people(might require buying IP’s and proper routing, if your ISP allows, or just buy colo).
You could start using gentoo(this computer might not be enough).
You could setup some AI project, they’re mostly just expensive space heaters.
You could use it as an electric space heater.

Would make a neat keychain

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I can see the nerdy flava flav with a whole workstation on a chain displaying system uptime.

Plan9, processor hub.

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