Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do With Half a Rack of Server Space? 208
New submitter Christian Gainsbrugh (3766717) writes I work at a company that is currently transitioning all our servers into the cloud. In the interim we have half a rack of server space in a great datacenter that will soon be sitting completely idle for the next few months until our lease runs out. Right now the space is occupied by around 8 HP g series servers, a watchguard xtm firewall, Cisco switch and some various other equipment. All in all there are probably around 20 or so physical XEON processors, and probably close to 10 tb of storage among all the machines. We have a dedicated 10 mbs connection that is burstable to 100mbs.
I'm curious what Slashdot readers would do if they were in a similar situation. Is there anything productive that could be done with these resources? Obviously something revenue generating is great, but even if there is something novel that could be done with these servers we would be interested in putting them to good use.
I'm curious what Slashdot readers would do if they were in a similar situation. Is there anything productive that could be done with these resources? Obviously something revenue generating is great, but even if there is something novel that could be done with these servers we would be interested in putting them to good use.
Crypto! (Score:4, Insightful)
Mine the shit out of any crypto that tickles your fancy!
mine protein structures (Score:2)
install the rosetta @ home boinc project and predict and desing protein strucures.
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silly. in current weather, i'd put a couple of pillows in there, take a Kindle and wait for the summer to pass me by.
Public Service (Score:2)
Re:Public Service (Score:5, Insightful)
That's similar to a BOFH story arc.
1. Configure the servers to serve as a 'cloud' resource using various open source software.
2. Show executives that this cloud computing system has much faster ping times than all the competitors.
3. Get the contract to provide cloud services.
4. PROFIT!
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Yeah, CPU-only coins last for about 48 hours before a GPU miner is released. As far as crypto-coins the fact is, a modern graphics card is faster than almost anything a CPU can do.
This applies mainly to those that simply choose a semi-standard hash algorithm, such as one of the SHA3 contestants or a combination thereof. Often there is GPU code already available, and building the miner is all about reading some specs and writing some glue code*. Also, most of these coins are based on Bitcoin and simply change the hash algo.
However, most Cryptonote coins (using the Cryptonight algo) have lasted for ages without an open GPU miner. For starters, they are not forked off Bitcoin. Boolb
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Most alt.coins are designed to be ASIC-hostile (Score:2)
For Bitcoin, ASIC is the only way to go, but most of the interesting alternative coins are designed to be hard or impossible to build ASIC miners for. (They're also designed to be GPU-miner-hostile, but some of those have been worked around.) One of the tradeoffs with that is that CPU-only mining is botnet-friendly; it's harder to abuse botnet machines' GPUs (especially in cloud servers or routers that don't have GPUs.)
I avoid the whole problem by mining Dogecoin; it's close enough to no value that it's s
Offer it to archiveteam to use in the mean time. (Score:4, Insightful)
We need help in every form we can get.
http://archiveteam.org/index.p... [archiveteam.org]
power, so no, not really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're getting power donated as well, you definitely should not be accepting every machine you can get.
If this stuff more than a few years old, the power bill is going to quickly eclipse the cost differential of better hardware.
Electricity costs vary, but a ballpark of 1 watt/year = $1 is roughly right around here. That doesn't include cooling. A probably conservative but very rough ballpark power estimate would be 3kW for that equipment...I didn't count hard drives, the firewall, the router, etc.
Re: power, so no, not really? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You sir are correct :)
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We graved all of yahoo videos in 3 days, we can move fast when needed to.
Keep It Ready (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.
Re:Keep It Ready (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's not forget, your employer is moving to the cloud either because they do not see value in what you provide, or they want you focusing on more strategic initiatives. You should probably spend some time cooking up something amazing in the old environment or, worst case scenario, using it as an opportunity to brush up on your skills and certifications.
Re:Keep It Ready (Score:4, Insightful)
Or their management is from the cult of MBA and fears actually owning anything, or they just saw an ad for the cloud and got sparkly eyes and said "ooooooooh, shiny!".
Meanwhile, a good admin will normally be just a bit bored because everything is running smoothly. It doesn't hurt if they have a zero priority thing to fiddle with as long as they continue working on the real mission.
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Or their management is from the cult of MBA and fears actually owning anything, or they just saw an ad for the cloud and got sparkly eyes and said "ooooooooh, shiny!".
I don't know of many small-to-medium sized businesses who migrate to the cloud because it's shiny. They all do it because they either read somewhere or were told by someone (most likely a salesperson) that it would save them money. Contrast that with the sysadmin constantly reminding them of the need for more hardware, more licenses, more overtime, etc.
Anyone who tells you an IaaS migration is about something other than cost is probably trying to sell you IaaS. Fear of running your own infrastructure is j
Re:Keep It Ready (Score:4)
They move for the imagined savings. The shiny is what keeps them from examining the 'savings' as closely as they should. It frequently turns out to be much smaller once you see past the dazzle.
It has it's place, it's just not all it's cracked up to be.
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Bank the money saved by owning the server vs cloud. By the time the server fails you'll have enough to buy 2 or 3.
OTOH, definitely consider the cloud as a DR measure.
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Few people use IaaS because they fear owning servers. Some people really like or need the flexibility. Some people have done the calculations and it does save them money. Some people don't want the hassle of looking after servers and want to concentrate on their core business.
You try and build a reliable and fully redundant data center for less than amazon charges. It's not so easy.
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I have been maintaining infrastructure for over a decade. I know what's involved.
When you mention flexibility, you're getting somewhere. If I needed a temporary capacity bump, the cloud would make a great deal of sense. It's not a bad DR plan either. But for the everyday capacity (the base load if you will), ownership is cheaper and offers better control.
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You really should reserve judgment until you know what his company does. For a lot of companies owning physical servers doesn't make sense.
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Actually, I was just expanding on the list of possible reasons.
Re:Outsourcing Exchange is always a PLUS (Score:2)
If you EVER had to do destkop support 1/3 of your calls our HELP MY PST IS CORRUPT I MUST HAVE IT ALL BACK!
It is great when the average person receives over +110 emails a day with a 100 meg quota is thrilling! People at work lose them all the time when their .pst hits 18 gigs and go all the way to SVP of IT to demand that billly gates fix it because they need every email for the past 10 years. ... ok rant off.
But with the cloud quotas and .pst files are a thing of the past. At least I would want to outsourc
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Nah, they'll just demand that you do something anyway. They'll go ballistic when the cloud service has a glitch and be absolutely certain you could fix it if you just tried hard enough..
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So those are the only t
Re:Keep It Ready (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to sound overly bleak here, but anyone asking the Slashdot crowd for ideas on how to generate revenue for their employer using commodity hardware is probably so far removed the actual business that their days are numbered. Your Infrastructure was outsourced to an IaaS provider because they don't want to pay for the iron. Next, it's PaaS - your hypervisors, databases, and operating systems, and you with it.
If you want some real advice, use it as a DR site (as GP stated) and make sure the business understands the risks associated with shutting it down, ensuring your ass is covered by having the CFO and/or CIO issue a statement to that effect (they will pin it on you when the cloud goes down regardless, because if you really read those IaaS contracts, the provider cannot be held liable). Then, walk away from it. Divorce yourself from the infrastructure discussions as much as you can, get involved with bigger and better initiatives so that once the salesmen show up with their PaaS offering, you're too well engrained in the big picture that they can't live without you.
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Ether they are right or they are wrong (cloud services saving them money).
For some companies the cloud will save them money and increase availability. Don't work for those companies as IT (janitor), work for them as IT (software developer).
Outsourcing development is something else again. But until they succeed in outsourcing backups etc you can safely assume that development is a non-starter.
In general outsourcers won't save you money if your IT department is competently run (outsourcers need to make
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In general outsourcers won't save you money if your IT department is competently run (outsourcers need to make a profit), but for the 90% of other cases your job is in danger.
What if your needs are small enough that having whole person doing it is 90% more people than you need? An outsourcing company could aggregate several businesses in the same situation, resulting in more efficient use of the staff and equipment.
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I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're not a business manager.
There are several reasons to switch to cloud services. Reducing current costs is one, but there are others.
A business may be facing a market change. The IT needs may grow or shrink rapidly, depending on external factors. Rather than hiring extra personnel and planning servers for needs that might arise, and adding training to the burden of the existing admins, it may just be simpler to migrate to a cloud provider while needs are worked out,
Re:Keep It Ready (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.
That was going to be my suggestion as well. I would not "get rid of it" or "donate it", Hell, I wouldn't let the lease expire either! I would keep that half-rack-o-stuff around for at least the next two years to see how well the "Cloud" does for you with the provider of choice. Plus, it never hurts to have a set of backup servers around that you control (that mirrors the data in the cloud, at least!). I have absolutely no faith in third-parties controlling my data and critical services. I might take advantage of some services but I would NEVER, EVER put my data under someone else's control ... did I say EVER? It's just a really bad idea and experience will teach you why. Good luck!
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One of the most common failover mistakes... (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.
Did you miss the part about them trying to cut opex? *siiiiiigh*
Even that aside...Maybe the latter, but not the former. One of the most common mistakes of failover environments is using the "old stuff" for failover/backup.
That works great, until you exceed the computing/storage capacity/bandwidth of the original hardware.
Let's say in a year traffic is up 30%. Something goes wrong, big time, with Teh Cloudz. You've done a good job of keeping the old hardware current and replicated. You 'flip the switch'...and the old environment promptly chokes...oops.
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You must not understand what "keep it ready" means.
Re:Keep It Ready (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be setting it up to keep a running backup of the data in the cloud, with the aforementioned 'keeping it ready' to serve from that data when the cloud gives way to sunshine.
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Nah. Get rid of the kit and use management direction changes as an excuse to buy better kit.
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I might add on to that. Keep it ready, and if it does get pushed to the cloud, keep the half-rack as a "disastrous recovery" [sic] site.
At the minimum, one can buy a small tape library (a single drive HP one that is 2-3U can store 300 TB, all encrypted, using LTO-6 tapes.) Add to this a 1U machine via a SAS card, and you now have archiving capability. A HP or Dell drive array is also 2-3Us, so add that onto the machine via your protocol of choice (SAS RAID 6), and now you have a place to stash critical d
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I seriously recommend this blog from Rackspace [rackspace.com] to those who are so caught up in cloudy-cluster-off-premises-corporate talk.
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Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.
Indeed. The cloud fad is already starting to pop as executives find out "Holy fuck, you mean when something goes wrong there's no amount of screaming I can do to make them prioritize our service?" and other things that weren't in the brochure. "You mean we're on a shared infrastructure so when one of the other tenants gets DDOSed we're down too? "
Or (my favorite) "You mean to actually have high availability we have to spend almost double the quoted price to run identical machines in another geographic-zo
of course (Score:5, Funny)
Darknet. TOR router. (Score:2)
Build a darknet. Maybe a TOR router? Donate CPU time to charity or some great number crunching project.
City Agriculture (Score:5, Funny)
Make a mini-grow-op.They'll never flag the extra power used for lamps.
CPU time for charity (Score:2, Insightful)
If you think good will for your company would go further than a few cryptocoins, you could do World Community Grid. [worldcommunitygrid.org]
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This suggestion would probably be the least work to set up and then tear down. Assuming the existing hardware is running a supported platform, it's just packages and a small amount of configuration and can run in an unprivileged account. When you get towards the end of the unplug date, start disabling new jobs from tasks with long-running jobs so you don't leave too many unfinished ones. And yes the WCG does have tasks that need storage, not just CPU.
Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ebay! An then you have the space for a pool-room, a porn-station, a man-cave or another dozen things with a dash in it.
tor exit node (Score:2)
do it
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Yeah, 10 Meg isn't tremendous, so a Tor exit is probably as good as you can get. It's too small for a mirror host or a torrent seeder.
I'm assuming you're unwilling to incur 95th percentile charges on your burstable. Tor allows easy bandwidth limiting right in the .conf.
Still, that's only one machine - 10 meg is easy to saturate.
Do absolutely nothing to implicate yourself. (Score:3, Insightful)
Internet Service Provider (Score:2)
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In the late 90s, Intel found one of the nets largest/most active porn sites hiding in the network.
mbs/Mbs (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt you can do much with a 10 milli-bit per second connection...
(Sorry, but I'm a scientist, units are important to me...)
Re: mbs/Mbs (Score:2)
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To be fair you're not very scientific about the whole thing. You are whing about a convention (and i do share your analattitude towards m/M conventin), but mili-bits doesn't make any sense. a bit is a 0-1 atomic unit. Atomic as is cannot but cut into smaller pieces. So mili-bit doesn't make sense.
But as a rate millibits per second could make sense. One mb per second would be equivalent to transmitting one bit every one thousand seconds.
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Not when measuring traffic speed. 10mbps is 10,000,000 bits per second.
Source [about.com]
Learn hadoop (Score:2, Interesting)
You have the makings of a mini-cluster there. Take the opportunity to learn to install/maintain/query hadoop.
Get a life? (Score:2)
install Eucalyptus (Score:2)
I'd install Eucalyptus and develop an application. Then when my lease ran out I'd redeploy it on AWS.
Fish Tank (Score:2)
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Show me a 21U fish tank. Seriously. That would be awesome.
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Tall and skinny... tricky to do.
With appropriate lighting, etc. you could maybe duplicate part of a kelp forrest/bed w/ one or to plants going all the way up and then the wee beasties like sea horses, etc.
Best strategy depends on where it is located (Score:2)
If it is in San Francisco area, take out the servers, furnish the rack, and rent it out.
backups, then continuing ed... (Score:2)
Second, I'd want the hardware used to try out some new software, techniques, file systems, media servers, etc. It's never too late to learn new skills, and what better to learn on than servers you don't mind wiping if they get messed up. Using them to mine bitcoins is far les
TOR relay (Score:2)
Because it is not just a job.. it is an adventure!
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Sounds like a great idea
https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
Depends on what data center (Score:3)
If its in say LD4 in London, or NY7 in New Jersey then I'd make a crapton of money leasing it out or selling VMs to brokerages. If its in ho-hum Dallas Rackspace somewhere or whatever then its not that interesting. Still, its a lot of iron to be idle in a big DS for that long. You could run a pretty serious web site on that sort of infrastructure. Maybe find some startup and leverage it, give them a leg up in return for some cheap equity. If it goes bust its no worse than leaving the rack idle and if it takes off you make some bucks.
Bitcoin mining? (Score:2)
Beer! (Score:4, Funny)
Install one of those cool laser beam tripwire (Score:2)
Each server is worth $189 or less. (Score:2)
If you want more servers like that, Wierd Stuff Warehouse [weirdstuff.com] in Sunnyvale, CA, has the same HP series G Xeon servers for $189. (2 3GHz quad-core Xeons per server! Hard drives are extra, but cheap.) Wierd Stuff has huge supplies of previous-generation data center equipment.
It's amazing how cheap computer hardware is now.
Assuming they are your personally: (Score:2)
Since you're asking this question, I'll assume that you have the freedom to do whatever you want with them. We'll assume they're your servers, personally. In that case, keeping them at the ready in case your cloud solution turns into a hurricane is a great idea that was mentioned previously.
Otherwise, a couple of things come to mind:
1) Start a web hosting company, using Linux and cPanel
2) Start a Private VPN service
3) Beowulf Cluster! (this is slashdot, after all...) or the modern version: OpenStack
4) Profi
Proxy (Score:2)
Not a network expert, but wouldn't some sort of internet proxy with caching be a simple way to help?
Other than that, the sad truth is that obsolete hardware is usually most productive when it's not using up valuable energy.
Science, of course (Score:2)
Seed! (Score:2)
Obviously.
Easy! (Score:2)
Rent out the processing/storage as a cloud service!
forget about it (Score:2)
I'd forget about it, let the lease run out.
First, I'd be afraid that anything I tried to use it for would become 'mission critical' once it existed, then I'm the one 6 months from now saying "Yeah... we can't get rid of that as we planned in the budget..."
Second, if you ever need something like that again, would you rather lease all new shiny stuff, or mess with rebuilding what you have as leftovers into something usable?
Its legacy stuff. get rid of it.
If you must, do something like run the Great Internet
do your job (Score:2)
and quit worring about wasting time on some goofy me me me project that's only temporary
Resell/donate (Score:2)
Since you don't have a specific use for these servers, it's best to find someone who does. This could be a godsend for another small company that will be able to start it's services immediately rather than waiting for presumably more expensive new servers to arrive.
Host your Resume (Score:2)
You should use them to host various flavours of your resume, because once everything is settled in to the cloud, your employment will be the next thing to expire.
Openstreetmap, Nominatim, OSRM (Score:2)
You could consider donating server space and bandwidth to Openstreetmap [openstreetmap.org] projects. There's a wiki [openstreetmap.org] for OSM but it's quite confusing at times. Then there's Nominatim [openstreetmap.org], the name search; it requires lots of computer resources [openstreetmap.org]. Open source routing from OSM data can be done with OSRM [project-osrm.org], which is quite fast.
Perhaps extracts of OSM data for downloading would be nice, eg. just roads, waters; see what's already available [openstreetmap.org].
If it hasn't already been sugested.. (Score:2)
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Good luck (Score:2)
With the numbers that ASICs are doing these days can you even get one coin using CPUs alone?
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You can't even get one coin using ASICs alone, unless you buy some three-thousand-dollar monster box packed with row upon row of them. And even then it would take weeks.
Bitcoin mining now is done using pools.
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There are places that will rent the rack space, but you provide the hardware to go in it. It's useful as you can more easily move the hardware to a new location, should they give you bad service. ... so just because a lease was mentioned, doesn't necesarily mean that they're leasing the servers.
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"[...] until our lease runs out."
This makes selling the equipment an even better ROI.
Re:porn (Score:4, Funny)
This is just half a rack... I'm more of a full rack guy.
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TOR exit nodes are in very short supply, and as a company you already have the protection of incorporation that prevents the biggest fear of exit operators (and the reason there are so few), being caught up in an investigation by police who kick down doors first and ask questions later.
Legally safe, if you've enough storage, Freenet could use more massive-storage cache nodes. Freenet has no exit to the non-freenet web, so you're not risking getting caught up in any investigation. But neither of these option
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TOR exit nodes are in very short supply, and as a company you already have the protection of incorporation that prevents the biggest fear of exit operators (and the reason there are so few), being caught up in an investigation by police who kick down doors first and ask questions late
LOL....
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It's an issue. It's routine practice when investigating internet crimes to execute search warrants via raids in order to prevent destruction of evidence. If they knock nicely, the suspect can have time to overwrite files or destroy media. Storming the home and forcing everyone to the ground at gunpoint may seem a bit heavy-handed (And occasionally there is a misunderstanding resulting in a shooting) but it's the only way to ensure evidence isn't destroyed.
The concern with Tor exit nodes is that if someone d
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Actually, no. Some beowulf clusters such as the Stone Souper are built that way. Most are built from brand new top of the line hardware.
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Half rack, 4 people? Less than two ribs each?
8-12 hours for ribs? You like overcooked ribs. 6-8 for St Louis style, 5-6 for baby backs.
8-12 hours if for shoulders and briskets.
Chianti with ribs? Roast not smoke? I'm just nit picking on a bad joke...I'll shutup now.
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Pushing this even further --- I have inherited a (mostly empty) 3,000 square foot data center (almost Tier III - but it shares a wall with the outside or so I'm told). I'm using (maybe) two racks.
Are you a Nigerian prince?
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Take the racks out, turn the aircon up to full and turn it into an ice skating rink?
You could hire a snow machine and make snow men too
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Not your bitcoin, MY bitcoin!
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bitcoin, mine!