ALR 9250
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Hi guys. I inherited a Compaq ALR 9250 server rack. I was wondering if it something that would be usable as a Freelancer server. It’s got 9 processors, 6 SCSI haqrd drives (2 sets of 3 parallel), a 24 port Cisco switch, and 12 gb of pc100 RAM (4 per cpu drawer). It’s a little old, built in 2001 I think. The processors are Pentium III Xeon 500 mhz. It’s also running MS Server 2003.
I was thinking I could clean her up a little, buy some newer processors or overclock the old ones, and try to run a server off of it. Because it has 3 cpu drawers, I could probably run a server on one or two, and a vent server on the other.
Does anyone have any knowledge of this type of rack and if it’s worth doing (other than the problem of getting someone to actually play on it)?
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Dunno bout the comp preferences and all that stuff but have running a server on 10 year old rig for years without problems! :oops:
Now its dead :lol:
Looking at the rack, man, this will suck too much power.
Prepare a valet for huge electricity bill.P.S. Welcome to TSP
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I can just imagine the amount of power that bitch is gonna be using and the heat it’s gonna be producing. The aluminium has to be worth a few bucks though
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No aluminum. Solid steel. This thing weighs a ton. As for power, you’d be surprised. Each CPU drawer has dual 400w power supplies. It only runs one at a time, unless more power is needed. The fans (4 per CPU drawer) are all variable speed and only runs what is needed. With the switch, CPU, and storage, it probably pulls about 600 watts. Not a whole lot more than a decent desktop. Of course, that’s only using one CPU drawer and storage drawer. If the whole thing was powered up and loaded I’d be looking at 2800 watts.
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600W for something that would faint at the idea of running anything newer than Windows 2000. It’s a nice piece of history, but it’s entirely useless for a server. The game’s minimum requirement is a 600MHz processor, just FYI, and having multiple CPUs doesn’t help in any way.
EDIT: Just to give you a proper idea of what I mean, my computer is running a Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz with 16GB of RAM. I also have a server running a Core i5-2500K with 16GB of RAM.
With both running at full tilt (linpack at maximum settings) I’m using a hair under 450W combined and that includes two LCD screens into the count. With the two combined, I have a total computing power of roughly 180 GFLOPS. By comparison, I’ve found data on a Dual-Pentium III at 1GHz giving it 0.471 GFLOPS in the best case. Even if we rounded up to 1 GFLOPS (and considering your 600MHz CPUs are probably lower than that value), that’s still over a hundred times slower while using less than 75% of the power.
Just shows how far we’ve come in about 15 years (the P3 Xeon 600MHz is from 1999).
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Yea, I figured as much. This thing is a web server, not a app server. It’s configured for Apache and MySQL with redundant storage.
The processors and RAM are upgradable. My question is is it worth it. The bandwidth is there, this thing was born to serve multiple connections. If I had a decent upload ISP (say 5mbps), I can get more recent processors. The cards are upgradable to 1.5mhz each. The server software is designed to distribute the load, I’m just not sure if FL can benefit from that.
By the way, I’ve been running a vanilla server for a few days (net, not LAN) and me and a few friends have had no problems or lag. It’s running Server 2003, a few years beyond Windows 2000.
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It can run a basic server for sure, but it’s not worth the power or heat. It’s also definitely not worth upgrading considering how hard/expensive those pieces are going to be. You’ll have infinitely more bang for your buck just getting a nice and quiet box for 600-700 bucks. That’s roughly what mine cost, and it also included an SSD though I reused the PSU and HDDs off an older box.
It’s also worth pointing out that newer CPUs will utterly destroy this machine even in highly threaded workloads like Apache. My desktop machine has 4 cores running 8 logical cores total, and each core more than beats 2 of yours. They also support x64 software and many new instruction sets. The memory is also dramatically faster, has higher bandwidth and capacity for cheaper. Oh, and idle power consumption is much lower (those two same boxes reach perhaps under 275W on idle).
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I think you have a fair chance actually. While it may not be an exotic setup, it’s certainly old enough to be rare and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that there’s a certain audience for it, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Your biggest hurdle will be size and weight, but again I wouldn’t be surprised to see takers regardless. Just be flexible enough regarding to pricing, as I wouldn’t be able to tell you what that thing is actually worth today.
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Lol, I’m actually getting hits on CL: http://orlando.craigslist.org/sys/3925452107.html
