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  • You should replace that thing with something more modern. I had a 5000p chipset system someone gave me with dual quad cores and an assload of ram.

    The shitty box idled over 400W. I went as far as getting low power ram and the newest CPU it would support that also supported frequency and power scaling and it still used over 400W on idle.

    This while I had a Xeon E5 box that was only a few years younger that uses more in the neighborhood of 50W on idle and utterly decimates the 5000 series box in CPU performance.

    You're probably better of fetching some old Ryzen 1800x system of ebay for higher performance and leagues lower power consumption.

    As for the raid, don't use it. Hardware raid has always been shit and in modern Linux and Windows is as good as completely depricated.

    • You're missing the point, it's not about using old hardware to daily drive them here, it's for the fun and thrill of discovering ancient hardware, software and technologies! I'll definitly need to see how much power this one is taking tho, but with only 1 out of 2 CPU I'd say around 200W for something this old

      • I have a HP Proliant DL380G7, basically the last server with a front side bus, and all the comments about it where about power per watt.

        and they're not wrong.

        I just don't think this is the community for old servers like this, self hosting is very much a practical consideration and the money spent on electricity running anything useful on these old things is better spent on a raspberry pi or stand alone NAS or something.

      • Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

        For history and "how things changed", go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000's (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90's (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

        x86 computers haven't changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we've been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

        For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.

  • I have a (crappy) poweredge and know for a fact that that's the wrong end to put the pizza on any rack server.

    Only heat would be from the drive backplain, all the boiling hot CPUs, RAM, and expansion cards are further back.

    • Who said it was too keep it warm ? Maybe it's too cool it off before eating it :)

      Also, drives can get pretty hot

  • I think I would get rid of that optical drive and install a converter for another drive like a 2.5 SATA. That way you could get an SSD for the OS and leave the bays for raid.

    Other than that depending on what you want to put on this beast and if you want to utilize the hardware raid will determine the recommendations.

    For example if you are thinking of a file server with zfs. You need to disable the hardware raid completely by getting it to expose the disks directly to the operating system. Most would investigate if the raid controller could be flashed into IT mode for this. If not some controllers do support just a simple JBOD mode which would be better than utilizing the raid in a zfs configuration. ZFS likes to directly maintain the disks. You can generally tell its correct if you can see all your disk serial numbers during setup.

    Now if you do want to utilize the raid controller and are interested in something like proxmox or just a simple Debian system. I have had great performance with XFS and hardware raid. You lose out on some advanced Copy on Write features but if disk I/O is your focus consider it worth playing with.

    My personal recommendation is get rid of the optical drive and replace it with a 2.5 converter for more installation options. I would also recommend getting that ram maxed and possibly upgrading the network card to a 10gb nic if possible. It wouldn't hurt to investigate the power supply. The original may be a bit dated and you may find a more modern supply that is more rnergy efficient.

    OS generally recommendation would be proxmox installed in zfs mode with an ashift of 12.

    (It's important to get this number right for performance because it can't be changed after creation. 12 for disks and most ssds. 13 for more modern ssds.)

    Only do zfs if you can bypass all the raid functions.

    I would install the rpool in a basic zfs mirror on a couple SSDs. When the system boots I would log into the web gui and create another zfs pool out of the spinners. Ashift 12. Now if this is mostly a pool for media storage I would make it a z2. If it is going to have vms on it I would make it a raid 10 style. Disk I/O is significantly improved for vms in a raid 10 style zfs pool.

    From here for a bit of easy zfs management I would install cockpit on top of the hypervisor with the zfs plugin. That should make it really easy to create, manage, and share zfs datasets.

    If you read this far and have considered a setup like this. One last warning. Use the proxmox web UI for all the tasks you can. Do not utilize the cockpit web UI for much more than zfs management.

    Have fun creating lxcs and vms for all the services you could want.

    • Hey, it's a 2005 server, it can't do IT mode, it only have Ultra SCSI 70GB drives, a 10 GB nic would be useless (it's only PCI, not PCIe) DDR2 RAM and 1 core processors only too!

      I'll probably install a Debian, I had fun trying Windows 2003 Server. It has a Floppy drive too, I'll definitely keep the DVD and Floppy drive in there! (the CD Drive is IDE btw) And you can only configure the RAID array via a CD provided by IBM (No, you cannot boot this CD from an USB key, as the software on the CD is looking for the dvd drive and not an USB key)

      Most of everything you said would be accurate for recent servers tho, but not here, not at all ahah!

47 comments