[olug] Tiny rack-mount chassis

[Obi-Wan]

On 01/10/2014 07:37 PM, Cheyenne Deal wrote:
> I have a few IBM X330 servers laying around, Single ~2.4Ghz 1gb of ram and
> two 36gb scsi drives.
> I have four or five spares, if you need one let me know

How much would you want for an X330 with a few drives?  How old is that 
hardware?

Those Soekris 6501's look pretty sweet, especially if I decide to get my 
firewall out of my cabinet and mount it directly to my wiring panel.  
With a couple drives, that's pushing my budget, though.  The 5501's are 
cheaper, but barely adequate.  I'd really prefer to buy current 
technology for the stuff that's likely to fail (ie, drives) so that I 
can quickly find replacements years from now.

Do current linux installs work well over a serial port to a headless 
device, or would I have to find a video card for the PCIe slot on those 
Soekris boxes just so I could install my OS?  I haven't done a 
non-graphical install in over a decade.

If there's a significant enough price difference, I may have to go ahead 
and get a traditional 1U server like several of you have mentioned.

>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf
>>>> Of Obi-Wan
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 10, 2014 3:32 PM
>>>> To: Omaha Linux Users Group
>>>> Subject: [olug] Tiny rack-mount chassis
>>>>
>>>> My 1st-gen HP DL360 server (Sam knows about this) that I'm using for
>>>> my home firewall is starting to get a little long in the tooth.  It
>>>> still runs perfectly, but it lost one of the mirrored drives this
>>>> morning, and I plugged in my last spare.  The build date on that
>>>> drive was 2001.
>>>> Replacement drives are cost prohibitive, so I'll be replacing the
>>>> entire chassis before I lose my last drives.
>>>>
>>>> This server runs PPPoE to terminate my DSL connection, iptables
>>>> firewall, mail server, incoming web/SSL proxy, DNS, and DHCP
>>>> servers.
>>>> It's a pretty light load, and even for that ancient box. I certainly
>>>> don't need much horsepower for this box.  I do want extreme
>>>> reliability.
>>>>   Mirrored drives are a must, and dual power supplies might be nice.
>>>> Dual
>>>> cooling fans are probably wise.  None of that needs to be hot-swap,
>>>> though.
>>>>   I need two ethernet ports (preferably GigE, and 3 would be nice
>>>> just in case).  I'd also like the chassis to be quite small so that
>>>> it can hang in a telco rack when I move next year.  I'd like it to
>>>> be really low power so that it'll run forever off my UPS when
>>>> necessary.
>>>>
>>>> Any suggestions on the hardware and/or case I should use for this?
>>>> I'm usually shopping at the other end of the horsepower spectrum.
>>>> There's got to be chassis out there that are way smaller than the
>>>> standard rack-mount server, but can still run a standard linux
>>>> distro with some redundancy.


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