Let it firstly be said that I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to legit enterprise grade servers or the like.
I picked up this, what I assume to be, quite old hp server from my local college for a dollar. They made me take some other heavy things along with it, but I digress. I know how to power the thing on. It does start up, I just have no freaking clue how to interface with it. Naturally I've tried jamming a keyboard, mouse, and vga monitor to it, but received no response whatsoever. I know it's probably not going to be able to handle much, performance wise, but I'd imagine it's still better than my current lineup of spare PCs. (Dell dimension 4100 anyone?)
So yeah, on with the info. It appears to be a hp 9000 rp3440 which I would guess they were using at one time to host their website.
http://imgur.com/a/ovKpP
http://imgur.com/a/VnCMi
...And that's all that I know. Apologies for the potato pictures, didn't put much effort into them as I assume pictures of the thing can probably be found online. If anybody on here could possibly shed some light on how the hell I can even so much as interface with it, I would be forever grateful. I am very willing to learn about this type of stuff, so if anybody has any good resources about what I'm about to dive into here, please let me know.
plug your VGA and what not to it power it up and wait,It might take a while to heave itself on. if not open it up and troubleshoot it or its just so old when you put power to it ,it fried itself.
P.S I work on HP Hardware alot but the oldest I've seen is a GEN2
I have a ProLiant DL580 G4 with four xeon's and 16GB of ram in my basement because my friends wanted to host our own 24/7 minecraft server but that never really took off.
Well, haven't seen one of them in a while.
That thing is about 10 years old at this point. Very interesting system as it uses an odd RISC architecture CPU. As a result quite low power consumption and ridiculous amounts of cache. (Which RISC requires)
The management cards on these things are... well.... crap. So the quickest way to interface with it and see what it is doing is through the console. You'll need an RS232 cable (Serial null cable) and another computer with a serial port on it. Or you can look into resetting the management card. (Search HPs site and you might find some info)
As a result of the processor type you'll be limited to what you can run and how well it will do it.
Good luck anyway, post back if you get any further.
Right, well it came with an assload of cables. Took pics of most the different types. It's sounding like I'll just be needing one of them?
http://imgur.com/a/jDMq0
Assuming one of these beauties has a serial port on it, I just need to connect the Console output on the server to the PC? Then what? Again, no experience. Though, I think my dad did at one point make software that ran on these, I don't know for sure but when I talked to him about it he seemed pretty confident that it could be used for something. He just has no idea what he's doing when it comes to hardware.
https://imgur.com/a/jDMq0#3 Furthest left (the grey one) is a serial cable.
A better question for your collection of computers, is which one doesn't have a serial port.
Well you'll need an OS on one of them.
If your using Windows, Putty is a good tool. You just need to check serial connection instead of SSH.
If your in unix, then you should start a screen on your serial device. (screen /dev/(serial) 9600 8N1).
9600 is usually the correct connection speed.
This should hopefully work.
As for the management card. LINK
Instructions were followed and I ended up with a blank putty terminal screen and no ability to type anything. Here are some pictures of the setup: http://imgur.com/a/ZLiH8
The switch pictured and the cables were all tested (Every pin) with a multimeter for continuity and they were perfect. I tested the PC's serial port by shorting pins 2 and 3 and connecting with putty and it passed. As you can see I tried two different ways of plugging it in to the server and neither proved successful. I tried the splitter way because a manual for the server said those 9 pin serial ports were for factory use only. I messed around with putty's handshake settings and none of that worked either.
So ah, don't really know what to do now. I've plugged it into a router and am sniffing the network for an ip currently.
