Acquired An Old Dell Power Edge 2800

[QuantumDecrypt]

I recently acquired a old server from a business that was running windows server 2003. I haven't done much to it other then watch the bios start up testing all the drives, which I believe had some bad ones, or at-least non-responsive ones.

The Server has:
2 Processors with 3.20Ghz Speed 800mhz Rvs L2Cache 2mb
4 1Gb Sticks of Ram
8 Seagate 32Gb Drives

The Server was hooked to a network and has locked Everything but a limited user out since it can no longer connect to said network. What Linux server Os should I put on this, and what Tests if any should i do?

 

[greens]

This is... a grey area.

Windows 2003 is ancient and no longer secure.
You can get into the server if you'd like, not allowed to help with that though, but it is painfully easy to get into NT systems.

Additionally you can force login as the local administrator by pressing F8 on start up if i remember correctly.

What do you want to do with it? It is going to be louder than a banshee, as hot as a toaster, and about as energy efficient as a hair dryer.

I have a 4 stack of similar power edges but i haven't found a use for them. Too loud and hot. probably has SCSI hard drives? Do they have the raid controllers in them then?

 

[QuantumDecrypt]

This is... a grey area.

Windows 2003 is ancient and no longer secure.
You can get into the server if you'd like, not allowed to help with that though, but it is painfully easy to get into NT systems.

Additionally you can force login as the local administrator by pressing F8 on start up if i remember correctly.

What do you want to do with it? It is going to be louder than a banshee, as hot as a toaster, and about as energy efficient as a hair dryer.

I have a 4 stack of similar power edges but i haven't found a use for them. Too loud and hot. probably has SCSI hard drives? Do they have the raid controllers in them then?

I Am taking classes for networking/ server admin so I was just going to try and get it running with a Linux distro, and maybe host a private minecraft server on it just to see if i could over a Home network. I have No honest use for it other then to learn from it and prove to myself that I can do it. I am not sure about the raid controllers I will have to check.

 

[greens]

Nice dude, should be a lot of fun!

You can look up the trinity rescue kit to play around with the current server install, getting in might be fun just to prove you can. You can also extract the key and resintall windows server 2003 if you want!

Otherwise just about any low resource linux distro will be good.

pfsense might be fun to play with a firewall.