BFCIT Posted January 12, 2014 Posted January 12, 2014 Hi, We have a win server 2003 that was once used for hosting sims for the schools LAN. We upgraded to a new server over the summer and I have been considering the best use of the old server. I am interested to learn how several of you have made use of old servers, monitoring, backups , virtualisation? cool creative alternatives? Or any ways which would provide extra functionality or increased efficiency in a school network setup? Thanks!
FN-GM Posted January 12, 2014 Posted January 12, 2014 When we retire a physical server we dispose of it. We don't run anything that is out of warranty. If you do decide to use it, i would advise against using Server 2003. The support for 2003 is finishing very soon, meaning you won't get security updates etc. Thanks 3
dhicks Posted January 12, 2014 Posted January 12, 2014 I am interested to learn how several of you have made use of old servers, monitoring, backups , virtualisation? cool creative alternatives? If you have any spare disks, or a bit of money available, stuff the server full of as many harddrives as possible and use it for either backups (a live file server that people can get versioned backups from) or a storage area for large media files. As pointed out above, either upgrade the version of Windows Server used (now might be a good time to try out Windows Server 2012 if you haven't already), or install Linux and set up a Samba server. 2
BFCIT Posted January 13, 2014 Author Posted January 13, 2014 Thank you to you both for your replies. I agree, it would be wise to eliminate server 2003 due to ageing issues and lack of MS support. We do use server 2012 on our new SIMS server however I do not think we will want to be paying for additional licenses. If we were to go down the Linux route, is there a particular distribution you think would be best matched to a server with: 500GB Hard disk Intel Xeon E520 1.86Hz 4GB RAM I am also intrigued about the live file server whereby versioned backups can be stored and retrieved. I know very little about this, are you able to point me to an article detailing this process? - Would this still be possible using a Linux O/S? Thanks in advance.
dhicks Posted January 13, 2014 Posted January 13, 2014 If we were to go down the Linux route, is there a particular distribution you think would be best matched to a server with: 500GB Hard disk, Intel Xeon E520 1.86Hz, 4GB RAM Is that an Intel Xeon E5520? If so, it has hardware support for virtualisation, and (depending on motherboard support) should support a fair bit more RAM - you can probably pick up 16GB or so cheap from eBay. Some more harddrives would be good, too. If you want to use this as a production file / backup server of any kind you'll want to have a RAID array of some kind, not just a single disk. Does the server itself have hardware RAID support, or at least room for additional harddrives? I generally go for Debian Linux - it's well known, stable, and you can generally find specific examples of how to set stuff up for it somewhere on the Internet. Pretty much all Linux distributions will do a software RAID array for you if you don't have hardware RAID support, and they will also act as a Windows-compatiable file server if you install and set up Samba. 1
sonofsanta Posted January 13, 2014 Posted January 13, 2014 Run a PHP development server for IT students? Did that here with a retired DC that was still a decent spec. Did pay to update the OS to 2012, and I'm not much fussed if it dies as I could rebuild it in a morning (copious notes were made, as written up on my blog here) and the files are backed up daily. Doesn't need much grunt, but it's made a big difference to the way the IT course can be taught now they don't need to rely on external hosting. 1
SHimmer45 Posted January 13, 2014 Posted January 13, 2014 retired a couple of Dell Poweredge 1900's a while back and they are still being used to test hyper-V and other virtual bits (only 1.6Ghz Xeons but have virtual support) you dont always needs the latest and greatest kit to achieve a task, good for learning on 1
cpjitservices Posted January 14, 2014 Posted January 14, 2014 we use old servers for samba shares or pfsense servers for learning. What ever really. We do have a few 2600's kicking about for anyone wanting to learn how to build web servers etc on Linux (namely CentOS). 1
BFCIT Posted January 14, 2014 Author Posted January 14, 2014 It is the E5320 David, I think it does have native support for virtualisation. I would like to thank you all for your input on here, some interesting ideas. Definitely worth giving something a go when I get a bit of free time. It sounds worthwhile playing around with a Linux distribution on here in order to provide users with a bit more shared space in the form of a samba server? For now back to HP support for wireless issues. Thanks once again!
twin--turbo Posted January 14, 2014 Posted January 14, 2014 We have a bunch of old HP ML350 G5's that run a test environment on 4x XenServer ( 2 running XenDesktop win7's 2 running Servers ) and a fifth running openfiler. Rob
zag Posted January 14, 2014 Posted January 14, 2014 I don't re-use any old servers. All our servers are the same hardware level and I wouldn't keep older stuff to mess that up.
cooka Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Bit of a boring answer here, use it as an image archive incase someone deletes any of our deployment images :/
cpjitservices Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Depending on what connections I Have available on the server I also use old servers for wiping drives or fixing drives, or even use it for BackTrack. I have used old servers for training in the past also.
rob_coles Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 We've used a few older servers for backup using freenas. Nothing critical but useful all the same
gavins38 Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 How about Nagios monitoring software? Runs on Linux. I prefer Ubuntu, as like Debian there's a wealth of knowledge online about how to achieve pretty much anything, if you look for it. I'm also currently looking at WPKG as a way of deploying exe based software across the network.
Slipknot1995 Posted June 4, 2014 Posted June 4, 2014 Hi, We have a win server 2003 that was once used for hosting sims for the schools LAN. We upgraded to a new server over the summer and I have been considering the best use of the old server. I am interested to learn how several of you have made use of old servers, monitoring, backups , virtualisation? cool creative alternatives? Or any ways which would provide extra functionality or increased efficiency in a school network setup? Thanks! We upgraded to a new win 2008 r2 server a while back, and where i work was just wanting to get rid of it, but the itself was in great condition had support vailed for it still form HP, so i came up with a plan to store all of our image backs ups and file server back up to the old server then to be copied to a tapes !! Was great seeing as that we didn’t have to buy another extra server for this purpose. Or even you could just use the server a testing lab, separate from your live network and servers, to test new software that you want to migrate into your live environment. Or you could install some free open source software like Freenas, pfsense for firewall purpose ?
bicky Posted June 4, 2014 Posted June 4, 2014 We have a few old ML350 G4 or DL360 G5 running Centos & Ubuntu. They are running Nagios for monitoring Xibo for Digital Signage Joomla for ICT Knowledgebase Avahi mDNS Helpdesk Software
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