OneFreeVoice

It’s true – one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. I know this to be true because I was the recent recipient of such a fortune. Back in October, I was talking to an old friend of mine over instant messenger, and I had mentioned that I was working with some old UltraSparc1 machines (thank you Ed Corrado). My friend thought I was wasting my time, and mentioned that he was about to throw away 4 old Dell workstations and an ancient Dell server. A quick arrangement was made, and I set a date to drive up to Manhattan and pick them up.

I had another friend of mine (thank you Daniel Zuckerman) ride shotgun on the way up and gave him two of the workstations. We ended up with 2 complete Dell Workstations and 2 Workstations missing various parts (Hard Drives and Memory were missing), and a nice PowerEdge 1300/700 Server.

Now I had asked my friend where he got the machines, and he said he took over an office from some Internet start-up that had shut down. After taking a cursory glance at my machines, I was not suprised. My whole workstation was a 500 Mhz Dell running Windows 98 and just about ever piece of spy-ware and ad-ware imaginable. The thing was so choked up it was barely able to run. And the server – well, it was running Windows Server 2000 and I couldn’t get past the password, so I threw in a LUG/IP ISO I had laying around and booted it up to take a peak at the file system and find out what was on there. I knew from taking a peak under the hood that there were two SCSI drives, and a single Processor and some memory. What I couldn’t believe when I got the machine running was that there was absolutely nothing on the second drive. From what I can tell, there was never even a filesystem on there. I thought it might have been wiped, but the other drive had all of it’s contents, and nothing in the remnents pointed to having another drive anywhere.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to expand my home network, have a true DMZ, move the wireless network off of the wired network, etc. But I was short a few machines to do this, and the thought of buying or building anything new to do it was a little too much. Not considering this network really only serves two people. These machines were exactly what I needed. I raided the spare parts drawer and put 3 nic cards in the workstation and installed IPCOP. Then I installed CentOS on the PowerEdge. I put the two 9GB SCSI drives into a RAID 1 mirror and put my website (this website) and my mailserver on there (I recommend Bill’s Linux Qmail Toaster). That server sits in the DMZ, and the old server is now just a file server. I’m happy that I was finally able to separate the two – protecting our critical files from the outside world.

Eventually, I will get an old IDE drive and some old memory for the other Dell workstation and either make it an internal DNS or mess around with LDAP and FDS. I still haven’t decided what to do with the to UltraSparc1′s. And I’m looking for a second 700Mhz processor for the PowerEdge. The slot 1 processors are rediculously cheap, but the hang up is the special heatsink and mounting bracket that I need.