Hardware donation September 2004
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These machines were sent to us by ... (I have to look up the name)... and ISP with a bankrupt customer who left these machines. I agreed to the donation, which was quite kind, and involved free shipping and everything, but now I slightly regret it, because the machines are quite old. I hope we can find a use for them. The 4U cases themselves are quite nice.
| ID | CPU | Ram | Drive1 | Drive 2 |
| A | P4 1.7 | 256M | 37G | - |
| B | P3 1.3 | 256M | 37G | - |
| C | P3 1.2 | 256M | 37G | X |
| D | P3 866 | 256M | 4G | 33G |
| E | P3 700 | 128M | 2G | 17G |
| F | P3 700 | 128M | 4G | 15G |
| G | P2 450 | 128M | 37G | x |
| H | P2 450 | 128M | 2G | 6G |
| I | P2 450 | 128M | 2G | 6G |
| J | P2 400 | 128M | ? | ? |
| K | P2 400 | 128M | ? | ? |
Additionally, there are some APC rackmount UPS's. 3 are 3U, 7 are 2U, and 2 are (not sure, they are in locked ugly black boxes and I'd have to move things around to find out.). All of them are "SmartUPS 700" models. I will use a few of these for the computers I use for Wikipedia (personal PCs, etc.)
And then there are the ugly black boxes, 12 of them. These are where each of the 12 servers and 12 UPS's were stored. These are useless and bulky, I have no idea what to do with them.
Install Wikipedia on their hard drives, buy some second hand monitors for them and donate them to schools or other worthy causes as desktop machines. Just an idea. -- Tim Starling 06:46, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Some options: How many drives can the cases take, what motherboards can they take?
- If they can take lots of drives and a motherboard upgrade these might be useful base systems for database slaves or storage servers, with the number of drives compensating for their size. If they can take lots of drives, they might be useful as archival storage or backup storage boxes.
- With motherboard or CPU upgrade or maybe just more RAM, these may be good candidates for remote squid service, like the setup in France, in sets of three. Depends on availability of rack space at the donor site and what RAM the motherboards can take without an upgrade. Saves us the rack space consideration.
- There's a fair chance that all of the P3s can take a replacement CPU and more RAM to upgrade them significantly.
- The P2s may be limited to 512MB max RAM, and are probably close to their maximum CPU speed, assuming we don't use a P3 Adaptor.
So, perhaps:
| ID | CPU | Ram | Drive1 | Drive 2 | Use |
| A | P4 1.7 | 256M | 37G | - | |
| B | P3 1.3 | 256M | 37G | - | |
| C | P3 1.2 | 256M | 37G | X | |
| D | P3 866 | 256M | 4G | 33G | |
| E | P3 700 | 128M | 2G | 17G | |
| F | P3 700 | 128M | 4G | 15G | Squid set 1 |
| G | P2 450 | 128M | 37G | x | Squid set 1 |
| H | P2 450 | 128M | 2G | 6G | Squid set 1 |
| I | P2 450 | 128M | 2G | 6G | Squid set 2 |
| J | P2 400 | 128M | ? | ? | Squid set 2 |
| K | P2 400 | 128M | ? | ? | Squid set 2 |
With a slight hard drive upgrade on the really small hard drives and maxxing out of the ram these machines could be used to host read-only copies of Wikipedia (updated continuously but without any locking). Would be nice for backup purposes, if nothing else, but hopefully it could also take some of the load off the read-write servers. Anthony DiPierro 23:28, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)