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I put this in here as it falls under the "assorted madness" banner.

This weekend, I finally retired a very old server. How old, you might ask? How about a 440BX motherboard with an Intel Celeron@340MHz with 384MB RAM. That old. The OS install on it was from 2004 (Mandrake 10, of all things) and the server was from well before that. It was my internal web host, mail host, and my hop host for external ssh connections. Believe it or not, it was still fully functional for all those roles.

The main reason for the decomissioning was not the hardware, but the need to update the OS and the desire to not try and shoe horn a current release onto the system. Not that I couldn't do it, but my day job involves support and such things so I tend to be a bit more pragmatic at home.

I haven't powered it off yet, but all the functionality has been moved to a still obsolete, but much less so, server with a pair pf quad core Intel Xeon 5420's at 2.5GHz. This system has a nice 8GB of RAM too.

Absolutely nothing of importantce here...

--SS

*edit* corrected processor type

Ahh.. the 440BX. I remember having a 600MHz PIII on one of those.. it was a Slot 1! I overclocked it from 600 Mhz to a whopping 642 Mhz! The motherboard was not setup for overclocking at all, and while I could actually push the CPU faster, the PCI bus and other peripherals starting spazzing out because you didn't just overclock the CPU, you overclocked every interface bus in the system, which quickly led to issues with peripherals (people complain that Ivy Bridge doesn't overclock...pshaww).

The main reason for the decomissioning was not the hardware, but the need to update the OS and the desire to not try and shoe horn a current release onto the system.

I'm with you there! I just built an Arch server from "obsolete" hardware (read: Core 2 quad + 8 GB RAM & SSD that is "only" running on a SATA II interface). With Arch moving to the requirements for using systemd and other services, getting all of that stuff running on a PIII-era system would be possible, but not very fun. It's not so much even the CPU requirement, as the memory usage of those services, while trivial on a modern system with multiple gigabytes of memory, starts to become a bigger issue on an old machine with very little memory. For example, my new server is idling with ~128 MB of memory in use with only the SSH server & OpenVPN servers running along with the basal systemd & dbus servers. That isn't much at all in a modern system (even one with a 4 year old motherboard), but would take up a sizeable chunk of the RAM available in an old PIII.

Wow, you kept that thing running far longer than I kept my old server going. I retired my Slot A Athlon server about 3 years ago...

And it has been running effectively 24x7 since 2004.

--SS

IIRC, my first 440BX system was a PII in 1997/8. Retired long ago, but it was a great system. Built to last. A moment of 0 for your server before the shutdown...

SecretSquirrel wrote:

I put this in here as it falls under the "assorted madness" banner.

This weekend, I finally retired a very old server. How old, you might ask? How about a 440BX motherboard with an Intel Celeron@340MHz with 384MB RAM. That old. The OS install on it was from 2004 (Mandrake 10, of all things) and the server was from well before that. It was my internal web host, mail host, and my hop host for external ssh connections. Believe it or not, it was still fully functional for all those roles.

The main reason for the decomissioning was not the hardware, but the need to update the OS and the desire to not try and shoe horn a current release onto the system. Not that I couldn't do it, but my day job involves support and such things so I tend to be a bit more pragmatic at home.

I haven't powered it off yet, but all the functionality has been moved to a still obsolete, but much less so, server with a pair pf quad core Intel Xeon 54020's at 2.5GHz. This system has a nice 8GB of RAM too.

Absolutely nothing of importantce here...

--SS

I tried looking up that model of Xeon as I don't recognize the name... And the first search result was this thread. Could someone tell me what core it's using?

I.S.T. wrote:

SecretSquirrel wrote:

I put this in here as it falls under the "assorted madness" banner.

This weekend, I finally retired a very old server. How old, you might ask? How about a 440BX motherboard with an Intel Celeron@340MHz with 384MB RAM. That old. The OS install on it was from 2004 (Mandrake 10, of all things) and the server was from well before that. It was my internal web host, mail host, and my hop host for external ssh connections. Believe it or not, it was still fully functional for all those roles.

The main reason for the decomissioning was not the hardware, but the need to update the OS and the desire to not try and shoe horn a current release onto the system. Not that I couldn't do it, but my day job involves support and such things so I tend to be a bit more pragmatic at home.

I haven't powered it off yet, but all the functionality has been moved to a still obsolete, but much less so, server with a pair pf quad core Intel Xeon 54020's at 2.5GHz. This system has a nice 8GB of RAM too.

Absolutely nothing of importantce here...

--SS

I tried looking up that model of Xeon as I don't recognize the name... And the first search result was this thread. Could someone tell me what core it's using?

It's a typo, should be 5420.

My trusty BP6 has been running almost as long, though the original dual 4.3g seagate 10k SCSI drives have since gone to the great hardware graveyard in the sky. The rest has been pretty well running 24/7 for the last 10 ish years. When I took it down for cleaning last month, found out both of the cpu fans had seized up, although being rated for faster P3s, they were fine enough for it to run passively.

Wow. 440BX. If I look at just one computer I've owned, I've been through eight whole platforms since the BX!
You, sir, are a trooper.

Mendocino 300A
Deschutes 400
Spitfire 600
Thunderbird 1000
Barts 2.5
Palermo 2.4
Conroe 2.13
Wolfdale 2.83
Sandy Bridge 3.3

SecretSquirrel wrote:

I.S.T. wrote:

SecretSquirrel wrote:

I put this in here as it falls under the "assorted madness" banner.

This weekend, I finally retired a very old server. How old, you might ask? How about a 440BX motherboard with an Intel Celeron@340MHz with 384MB RAM. That old. The OS install on it was from 2004 (Mandrake 10, of all things) and the server was from well before that. It was my internal web host, mail host, and my hop host for external ssh connections. Believe it or not, it was still fully functional for all those roles.

The main reason for the decomissioning was not the hardware, but the need to update the OS and the desire to not try and shoe horn a current release onto the system. Not that I couldn't do it, but my day job involves support and such things so I tend to be a bit more pragmatic at home.

I haven't powered it off yet, but all the functionality has been moved to a still obsolete, but much less so, server with a pair pf quad core Intel Xeon 54020's at 2.5GHz. This system has a nice 8GB of RAM too.

Absolutely nothing of importantce here...

--SS

I tried looking up that model of Xeon as I don't recognize the name... And the first search result was this thread. Could someone tell me what core it's using?

It's a typo, should be 5420.

Thank you.