Spare Server - What to do?

[Pete10141748]

We found some great uses for our old server.
For a month it acted as a very nice footstall under the workbench in the office, then it became a very nutritional lunch for the skip!
Oh, and we also gutted the poor thing and removed all it's componants, which are now adorning the shelving in the office, gathering dust and generally looking like crap, with the exception of the 1Gb RAM, which we put in a Windows 2000 machine to keep it running until the grip on the school's wallet is released by the powers that be
We tried to put the HDD in one of the admin PC's, but it turned out that the PC already had a bigger HDD than the server's old one 8O Yes, it really was that bad

[Joedetic]

Or, not only run nagios...run cacti too and get some SNMP graphing on the go. Great for monitoring hard drive space in all those servers you've got and network traffic on switches etc etc.

[j17sparky]

Test webserver for the kids.

When i get round to it im going to; setup apache etc, samba with ldap auth with each kid having an area which is avalible as a mapped drive in windows. All areas will be under the httpdocs/www folder so the kids wil just have to browse to

http://server/username

Then a cron job to delete all files at the end of each day so that the kids dont start using it as a dumping ground for music/pics/etc

[TekkyMatt]

I have just acquired a spare and I turned it into a streaming media server. Put all our old-but-still used video's on there, all of our homemade content, taped TV shows from teacher tv and BBC (all legal). Its a route where you have to be aware of copyright issues etc but it will remove the need for TV's, VCR's, Stereos, some DVD's. It is only being designed to stream to 15 machines (only those connected to projector/whitebaord) all done through links in a webpage using VLC (fedora on server). It worked great until a more important server had hardware issues and the media server had to canibalised, but it will be back by popular demand in the new year !!

[djm968]

Install VMWare server (free download)

Its the best way to try various Operating Systems and applications without having to rebuild base server everytime.

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/faqs.html

[brubakes]

Could always set it up as a dedicated traffic scanner.