The Art of Dumpster Diving

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was “Sweet, going dumpster diving today”. After thinking about it for a little while longer, I started to get a little depressed about going, it seemed almost like a waste of time on a monday morning, there wouldn’t be anything good in the dumpsters!

Despite these thoughts, I called up Joe and we went anyways. Bright and early. 10 oclock.

Now, of course, thinking I wouldn’t find anything, I practically struck gold. After careful observation of the electronics dumpster, Joe and i managed to pull out two old Compaq servers. One 5U rack server, and one enormous tower server. Each has 5 hotswap bays which I am very excited about. Now of course, seeing as they were in the dump, neither are in working condition, but I do plan to change this. Me and Joe will be directing attention to them Wednesday evening to swap some parts here and there and see what will do.

I was very surprised to see that the tower still had all 5 hard drives in it. I believe each one is 4.5 Gb, but since the computer doesn’t turn on, I don’t know for sure. Thats just what the labels on the bays said. The drives could be bigger. We’ll see once i get it up and running. I plan on swapping out the motherboard and power supply with newer ones. and then i can use the RAID controller thats already in there and hook up all the drives. We’ll see if we can get it working.

As for the rack, I’m not quite sure what I can do with that one. It has no drives and seems to only take SCSI drives which I don’t have any of. But i have yet to fiddle with that as well.

Definitely will write more on what happens with these computers soon.

Heres pics:

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3529.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3530.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3531.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3532.jpg

New Rack Server Cluster

Ok so despite lack of recent blog activity, I have been fairly busy doing things. Not too much on the programming side which is really why I haven’t been posting. But lots has happened on the hardware side.

My friend Joe found a steel rack enclosure back behind the movie theater (don’t ask me why it was behind a movie theater because I honestly don’t know), and so we lugged it over to my house and stuck my racks in it. That is, after getting all the racks working. We are still working on clustering the 3 racks together but we are running into some difficulties with that. We’ll figure it out eventually. Anyways, heres pictures!