Do PII 400MHz still have any uses?

I know you still can run DNS, e-mail, etc. on them without any problems using FreeBSD or Linux.

But would anyone here still order one if the price was right?

I am just looking for comments, if people would order them for this/these purposes.

SrvOutsource, I have seen people selling 500 mhz and 400 mhz boxes over here and actually many people were intrested. Take a peek at Dedicated and Colo Hosting Requests forum , many people are intrested in Cheap Low end dedicated servers. Im sure if the price is good you will find plenty of customers.

Yup.. The low end boxes seem to get snatched up pretty fast when they are offered...

SrvOutsource - if you have a supplier with good pricing for these, please do contact me with the information - as I'd be interested.

Is it our local company A1000?

If the price was right, and I needed a box for a specific purpose (monitoring, etc) then yes... You could toss a large hard drive in them and do remote backup, install nagios and monitor your other servers, use it as a backup dns and MX server, they're infinitely useful. Not something you want to use for your main webhosting server, of course :)

-David

I use an old 500mhz k6-2 for remote monitoring, backups, etc. but a 400mhz...target practice! >:D

Older boxes are also good for irc/shell hosting as long as you have a decent firewall setup (either software or hardware)

it's still rock solid :)

IMO it would be perfect for backup, email or DNS purposes :)

I would definitely get one given the price is good :)

Here is what the hardware specs would be:

PII 400MHz
128MB RAM
6.4GB HD

I'd use it as a testing server. I got a 700Mhz Celeron doing just that. It's worked great for me :)

Originally posted by SrvOutsource
Here is what the hardware specs would be:

PII 400MHz
128MB RAM
6.4GB HD

The smallish hard drive would likely turn me away from that, but it'd work well for some purposes irregardless. Have you set a pricing structure for them at all?

-David

Originally posted by thedavid
The smallish hard drive would likely turn me away from that, but it'd work well for some purposes irregardless. Have you set a pricing structure for them at all?

-David

I was thinking about US$35-39/Month with 500GB BW.

My college is selling off a bunch of old lab systems (p3 800mhz, 256ram, 20gb hd's) for $150 ea, I'm thinking about buying a bunch and getting cage space at my datacenter to host them as cheap unmanaged dedicateds. The thing is, they are desktop cases, so the cage would be needed. I dont want to go to the trouble of buying 1U cases and transferring components.

Originally posted by thedavid
Not something you want to use for your main webhosting server, of course :)
Hey hey now!

Celeron 366 / 512MB RAM / 8.4 gb hard drive

We use four of those as the front-line squid caches. They can pump out about 20Mbit each. A PII/400 would make a great download server, but apache would be pretty heavy for the task.

Originally posted by SrvOutsource
I was thinking about US$35-39/Month with 500GB BW.


You might get DirectAdmin and throw on them.. I'm sure they'd go in no time :D

Hell I'd likely pick one up for a DNS/rDNS box...

Just be sure to offer an option to upgrade the hdd :D

Originally posted by The Prohacker
You might get DirectAdmin and throw on them.. I'm sure they'd go in no time :D

Hell I'd likely pick one up for a DNS/rDNS box...

Just be sure to offer an option to upgrade the hdd :D

Direct Admin alone is worth about $29/Month.
And that's with the special price they are having until the end of the year.

It only works on RH 7.2 -> 9.0, which is EOL. :(


Since these are older models, I'm not sure if the BIOS supports anything larger than a 8GB HD.

Theres a way to get direct admin for $9.95 - I dont know how because I dont do billing, but currently we only pay $9.95 for a DA license - check it out.

(atleast im pretty sure)

Originally posted by amish_geek
My college is selling off a bunch of old lab systems (p3 800mhz, 256ram, 20gb hd's) for $150 ea, I'm thinking about buying a bunch and getting cage space at my datacenter to host them as cheap unmanaged dedicateds. The thing is, they are desktop cases, so the cage would be needed. I dont want to go to the trouble of buying 1U cases and transferring components.

How many does your school have?

20+?

Can you PM me some contact information for them, please?

Originally posted by Mrdredd
Theres a way to get direct admin for $9.95 - I dont know how because I dont do billing, but currently we only pay $9.95 for a DA license - check it out.

(atleast im pretty sure)

Even at $9.95, that lows the price of the server down to $25-29/Month.

use it as an optional addon :)

Originally posted by SrvOutsource
Direct Admin alone is worth about $29/Month.
And that's with the special price they are having until the end of the year.

It only works on RH 7.2 -> 9.0, which is EOL. :(


Since these are older models, I'm not sure if the BIOS supports anything larger than a 8GB HD.


http://www.directadmin.com/internal.html

Also FreeBSD is in beta and should be out soon.. And likely Debian support will be out before the end of the year.. Hopefully :D

Would there be a market for dedicated backup DNS servers on low powered machines like these? Maybe restrict the servers to only DNS.... or DNS, backup MX, and rsync for backups?

A fine idea...i could use a good server for backups.

Originally posted by SrvOutsource
Direct Admin alone is worth about $29/Month.
And that's with the special price they are having until the end of the year.

It only works on RH 7.2 -> 9.0, which is EOL. :(


Since these are older models, I'm not sure if the BIOS supports anything larger than a 8GB HD.

DA also works on FreeBSD, it's in the final stages of beta. They are currently running the last beta for 60 days to ensure no other issues arise, if at the end of that time its still stable it will be released. I think cPanel could learn a lot from the testing methodologies used by DA.

Even $35 seems a little high, as odd as it may seem. SM's 1.7 GHz Celery for $49 ($59 w/o setup) would blow it away in terms of performance, for not much more.

I've got a 300 MHz box on a T1 I use; it works pretty well, but then again, it's pushing about 1 GB a month. (It's funny you mention this... Last night I had a dream that I checked cpuinfo and saw that it was 400 MHz. I think it's time I see a shrink. ;))

Maybe you could cap the upload on the boxes to 1.5mbit, and have the download at 10mbit? Just an idea.

Originally posted by deltawolf
I use an old 500mhz k6-2 for remote monitoring, backups, etc. but a 400mhz...target practice! >:D

That's not fair.. At least it would be more usefull if used as a doorstop or something :x

To answer the original question, yes, throw in a 30 or 40 Gb drive in there and I'd use it as a backup server (although I am building one here at home for that same purpose, if you can offer them before I get done, I may order one). Not much I could use a P2 400 MHz with only a 6 Gb drive unfortunately.

Originally posted by SrvOutsource
I was thinking about US$35-39/Month with 500GB BW.

No need for 500GB bandwidth. Those processors are not capable of doing to much, there's not really a way you could use 500GB with such machines (apart from fileservers maybe). If I were you I'd go for something like $25 with like 50-100GB bandwidth.

I think there would be plenty of people interested in such a box.

Also, throw them on your IRC network and let people use them as junk IRC servers. That's another purpose..

So here's what people could use them for..

A) backup server
B) test server
C) a server serving a few unimportant pages
D) IRC server
E) email server
F) email server

There's plenty of uses left for those servers. Or, you can sell them to me in bulk on discount and I'll put them online. :D

I would gladly pick one up if the price is right and use it for testing purposes. Install any new software, mess with it, break it, and format. When i don't want to do that any longer, i would use it to run a couple of applications and do a stress test.

Thounds of things you can do with one of those measly boxes. D:

Originally posted by Vox Hosting
Also, throw them on your IRC network and let people use them as junk IRC servers. That's another purpose..

So here's what people could use them for..

A) backup server
B) test server
C) a server serving a few unimportant pages
D) IRC server
E) email server
F) email server

There's plenty of uses left for those servers. Or, you can sell them to me in bulk on discount and I'll put them online. :D



If I am not wrong, they allow IRC only on MIANET-4 (Single-homed Cogent)

Originally posted by Trimax
If I am not wrong, they allow IRC only on MIANET-4 (Single-homed Cogent)

Hm yeh that would be kinda useless. I don't have anything against Cogent at all, they provide great quality for this pricing. However Cogent is completely useless for IRC hosting. Cogent has regulary (small) outages. One outage of only a few seconds causes a whole network, bouncer, or whatever to go down already. Unlike website hosting, that will not work at all. You need solid quality for that, not outages now and then.

MIANET4 (Cogent) i sthe only network we allow IRC on, and have several people using it for IRC servers without any problems.

We also monitor the networks, have havn't seen Cogent have any regular (small) outages, or our alert system would be driving us crazy.

Originally posted by Vox Hosting
To answer the original question, yes, throw in a 30 or 40 Gb drive in there and I'd use it as a backup server (although I am building one here at home for that same purpose, if you can offer them before I get done, I may order one). Not much I could use a P2 400 MHz with only a 6 Gb drive unfortunately.

Problem is, I don't think the BIOS will support anything lareger then a 8GB HD. :(

I'll have to check it out.

They'd be strange if they didn't support larger - I have a 433 here (really cruddy machine) - it supports a 40 gig, at least. YMMV of course...

-David

True.

But that is a newer motherboard then a PII.
I think those boards will support up to a 80-120GB, but varies on the motherboards manufacture.

And these are HP systems.

I dont know exactly what your talking bout with system supporting low size hd, i have a 100Mhz P1 with 32 megs edo, and a 80 gig HD in it with no problems, I just poped it in, formated it, and installed Red Hat 7.2 :)

Great little backup server. On my internal network, i have gotten it up to 700killaBYTES/second transfering one large file. Small files take a bit longer.

Thats good.

We threw some older Pentium systems away because we tried to install larger HD's, and the on-board BIOS would not see them over 8.4GB.
And there was no BIOS updates available.

But all systems are different.
You gotta love computers.

I'd go for one for a test-bed if OS restores were free. ;)

I'm hosting daemonology.net (and update.daemonology.net) off a dual PPro 200. Works perfectly fine; of course, I'm not running any CGI scripts apart from 14all.

ISTR that pair.com started on a single P90; hosting static files does not require much CPU power at all.

why not use it to set up nagios to monitor your servers...

Originally posted by cperciva
ISTR that pair.com started on a single P90; hosting static files does not require much CPU power at all.

Pentium 120 MHz, 64MB 70ns FPM RAM, actually :) But our first workstation was a 486/50 with 8MB RAM. Oh, the wonders of FreeBSD 2.0.5.

Kevin

Originally posted by sigma
Pentium 120 MHz, 64MB 70ns FPM RAM, actually :)

Close enough. The point is, static HTTP hosting doesn't require much CPU power.

i have AMD K2 500mhz machine with only 256 mb ram on it and it works well even with windows xp !!!

i think it should be able to handle atleast 100 web sites with decent traffic.