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How Do I Put Unused Servers To Work?

Posted by timothy on from the what-does-your-inner-ringmaster-say? dept.

olyar writes "I worked for an internet start-up last year and during the 'we have plenty of money' phase, a lot of server hardware was purchased. Eight months later, there is very little money, but we're still plugging along — using only a fraction of the hardware. We just cleared out a co-lo and I now have a stack of 17, 1U servers in my garage. Each of those has 2 servers, each of which is a 2-processor, dual-core box with 8 GB of RAM. Add that up and I have 136 processors and 272 GB of RAM with nothing to do. The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS. The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well. So I've been brainstorming ways to put all of that power to good use. Any ideas?"

4 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Donate to At Home Projects by cbiltcliffe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Have you thought about just selling the servers?

    Just leave the garage door open for a few hours one night, and the problem will probably take care of itself. :)

    --
    "City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
  2. Well you could always benefit the hacker community by nightowl03d · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just install XP without any patches on them and hook them up to the internet without a firewall. I can assure you they will be fully utilized in short order.

  3. Re:Donate to At Home Projects by c00rdb · · Score: 5, Funny

    127.0.0.1

  4. Re:Donate to At Home Projects by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

    127.0.0.1

    Oh my god, that moron is running SSH that gives me root access with the same basic password I use! Learn to use a Firewall or use a better password, n00b!

    Here comes a big fat rm -rf / {#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER")

    --
    My work here is dung.