Discussion on:

10 things you can do to give old servers a second life

Do any of these suggestions sound like they might help you extend the life of your old servers? What other creative uses have you found for that old equipment?

That I see only a Windows Solution being offered? There are other ways to re-utilize most IT equipment. For instance as a Linux School server.

I was merely writing with a Windows network in mind, but of course that would another good use for an old server (and there are many more, e.g. Linux/Unix/FreeBSD mail server, Web server, proxy server or firewall. In mitigation, I did mention you could use it to practice your "alternative" operating system skills

You mentioned setting up a firewall with Smoothwall. That should count for something, I suppose.

All the solutions are costly, or proprietary, or lock you into someone else's AGENDA!!!

How about the firewall, http://ipcop.org and on that, you run Dans Guardian webpage filter, if in a school or kids usage environment? http://dansguardian.org

Plus, SpamAssassin!!!

And, please don't forget all our spammers just waiting to get into the honeypot you could run! That really slows them down, if enough of us run one!

At beginning of this semester the Linux Users Group here assisted is setting up a used QUAD server as the school server, plus 48 donated P4 Compaqs, all running Fedora Core 5, at a private Montoressi style school.

The licensing costs of ~$84,000 for Microsoft and their 'Trusted Partners' crapware was beyond the pale!

Linux does process upto 50X faster, and, one linux server can handle the workload and tasking of up to 12 Microsoft servers!

Is it any wonder why the bean counters at MS insisted on running 45,000 Linux servers for Hotmail.com, MSN.com, Microsoft.com, the Linux Labs 400+, and, all Redmond Campus and Corporate firewalls, Aruba Routers, and systems?

Now, my favorite noob distro, with 1900 FREE games and programs, is http://pclinuxos.com
as it runs my old PII 300's through PIII 800's at speeds never envisioned by Intel!

Just a few of the 310 Linux complete liveCDroms FREE at http://livecdlist.com

Free help forums on the websites, to help you! Linux is FREE like speech, not beer.
Try a bit of FREEdom of choice!

How can you say "All the solutions are costly, or proprietary" when almost everything is free?

Having said that, I like SpamAssassin and Dan's Guardian.

You said "almost everything is free", which (if you're talking about how much something costs) has nothing to do with whether something is proprietary. There's a lot of proprietary software out there.

Also, a lot of the stuff is actually costly, since it involves the use of Windows.

Indeed

Maybe I read a different article than the majority of the posters read.
Merely suggestions, a person can go about implementing them any way they like.

Some of these suggestions are ones that may be critical or at least ones that can't afford to be down for too long. The problem we're having with older hardware is getting maintenance coverage on it. Coverage for some of our four and five year old servers costs more annually than a new box. This needs to be considered when selecting a use for an old server. One good solution if you have more than one of the same thing is to mothball one for parts.

There's a fine line between utilizable and costing to much for maintenance...but if you can keep the distinction in mind you'll be ok.

1. Parse out your network functions and deploy them on paired servers...two old machines may equal the performance of one new one while providing reduncancy. This works well for external DNS servers, internal DHCP machines, print queue managers and the like.

2. Move the old hardware to the lab - and then take the old lab machines over to your nearest school or charity. The non-profit can use the equipment, and your company will get a reasonable write off come tax time. Be sure to use an OS that is legal, and wipe the data before your begin.

3. Take the old hardware and use it to host forums for the linux/windows flame wars. Never seem to have enough bandwidth for all the heat generated by that topic.

1. Redundancy is good. Cheap redundancy is usually better.

2. If you're giving away systems that have had sensitive data on them, you may want to go further than simply wiping the hard drives. In fact, the law may well require it. You may have to junk the drives entirely, and let the nonprofit pay for new drives (or swap in some drives that didn't have sensitive data on them). Hey -- at least the hardware was free.

3. Of course, such servers for Linux/Windows flame wars should be running FreeBSD or OpenSolaris, just to be fair (and because MS Windows would be terrible for servers on outdated hardware).

This article could easily be titled...
"10 ways Linux can revive your old equipment"
Pretty much all of these jobs are things where Linux excels, and your outlay cost would be zero given you are re-tasking old hardware.
In fact if you run an imaging server, you can replace the expensive ghost with G4U and a simple Linux FTP server with a good sized HD slapped in it and a tape drive or mirroring.

In fact we have hoardes of little Linux boxes quitely puttering away on re-tasked hardware. They never complain, they never fail. They just work.

They make great departmental print servers/spoolers too. Especially if you setup a PDF printer that dumps PDF output to a shared folder for pickup. Sure cheaper than installing distiller on 100 machines.

What about PostPath to replace Exchange and offer similar functionality? I haven't tried it myself, but I will as soon as I have the hardware for it.

http://www.postpath.com/

Another option is Open-Xchange.

We have a few customers that we moved to the SuSE Linux Open Exchange server package and it's a really good product. stable, fast, and relatively cheap. PLus it's much less resource intensive, so it's easy to move onto existing equipment. For example, one customer was going to upgrade their MS Exchange hardware becaue usage growth had led to performance issues. We convinced them to keep the hardware, and move to SUSE/OpenExchange. Not only did performance improve, but we were also able to add all the users from their other plant onto it as well, and still had plenty of overhead on the server. They were also able to stop wasting a salary on a full time MCSE to maintain the MS EXchange server which had required a full time administrator.

It's precisely because of experiences such as what you describe that I recommended going with something -- anything -- other than MS Exchange at a previous place of employment. The VP was all gung-ho about migrating from a Qmail system to MS Exchange. To satisfy his desire for Outlook extensions and the bullet point feature list of Exchange, I ended up saying we should go with Open-Xchange instead. Anyone else at the company who had an opinion agreed with me as well, that MS Exchange would be a problem.

Almost everyone at the company who did any of the real work there was on a Linux laptop or workstation (algorithms and tracking systems development). Introducing an MS Exchange server would have simply made life difficult for them. The VP's suggested solution: "Maybe we should just move everyone to Windows." That went over like a lead balloon.

Among other concerns that were raised, was the "with every Exchange server you need a full-time MCSE to admin the thing" factor.

Somehow, though, being basically the entire IT department myself, I ended up being the VP's target for his frustration over his "opinion" (mostly gathered from an advertisement he saw in a magazine -- really and truly, he showed me the ad) not being regarded universally as perfect and without negative side-effects. A conflict of personality began to grow at that point, ultimately leading to me and that company parting company.

Other than the VP and the President, that was an excellent place to work. Such a shame.

"They were also able to stop wasting a salary on a full time MCSE to maintain the MS EXchange server which had required a full time administrator."

Which is why it is so rare for an MCSE to push Linux.

"They were also able to stop wasting a salary on a full time MCSE to maintain the MS EXchange server which had required a full time administrator."

I've never known Exchange to be that much work to need a "full time" admin. Someone must've been taking advantage of that company.

If you've never seen a need for a full-time Exchange admin, you've probably never seen an enterprise network where Exchange servers operate under extremely heavy load, serving thousands of employees, utilizing a significant majority of the capabilities of the Exchange server "product" and a few third-party options besides. I have. It's not a pretty sight, and a full-time Exchange admin is definitely required to ensure reasonable uptime and performance.

If you've got a large user base and a lot of turnover, along with a lot of servers requiring regular patching, I can see how that would be necessary.

I'm not used to more than about three hundred users. It sounds to me with that large of a demand, any solution is going to require a bit of administrative overhead.

. . . and some solutions require much more than others.

So... MCSE's have to eat too.

It's not my fault someone decided to wrap up his whole career in a single certification.

I'm Microsoft certified too -- but I make my money in ways completely unrelated to that, and I like it that way.

I thought the article said "Old TIMERS."