Open to suggestions on what to do with this box

R

Red Squirrel

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Nov 29, 2009
Messages
9,211
I've acquired a free 1U server that used to be a Juniper Netscreen IDP100, it's fairly old:

Dell PE1650:
-16GB SCSI drive
-1GB of ram
- Pentium 3 processor, says 1266Mhz... does this make sense for P3? Seems high
- 4 network cards

Just looking for suggestions on what is the best use of this box. The obvious one, is Untangle, especially with all those nics, I can probably do some interesting routing and what not. But will this machine support it?

Things that I'd love to have:

- Firewall / network security box (such as untangle). I mostly want to know what's going in and out, want to see fancy graphs, do traffic shaping, port forwarding, IP blocking etc...
- PBX (asterisk)
- Network monitoring (Pandora, Nagios etc...)

Personally, I'm leaning towards network monitoring box, as if it goes down it's not the end of the world, but the thought of having untangle is pretty cool too. The fact that it uses SCSI drives make it much harder as those are super expensive. I will probably just use that drive for boot and plug in a USB enclosure for the actual OS/data. A box this old is probably USB1.0 so it may be slow but I could be wrong.
 
Pfsense. Not sure what it has for network monitoring, but I know it has something similar to Asterisk. Would run pretty decent on that hardware
 
Yes P3's went up to 1.2Ghz.

My last pfsense before switching to 1.7ghz celeron/1GB ram was a 1Ghz P3.

4 people torrenting torrents with 1000's of seeders, running speed tests, and refreshing the steam browser all at once, all at the same time managed to crash the thing. I was proud

However 8 of us just recently tried on the my new pfsense, and it just chuckled at our futile attempt.

In conculsion... I agree with the poser above. PFSENSE the thing!
 
Yeah I'm thinking pfsense may be my best bet. Been reading up on it and it does look promising. I can't find anything about the monitoring part, but it's not like I have that now anyway, so it's not a must. I understand something like that probably takes up lot of resources, so I'd want a bigger box for that anyway.
 
Untangle will not work too well on that box. I mean it will work, but it will likely be sloooow.
Best bet has already been proposed. Throw PFSence on it. It'll do QOS better then any other out there. Also has some handy traffic graphs and such :cool:
 
pwrusr said:
Untangle will not work too well on that box. I mean it will work, but it will likely be sloooow.
Best bet has already been proposed. Throw PFSence on it. It'll do QOS better then any other out there. Also has some handy traffic graphs and such :cool:
Click to expand...

He can put Untangle on it, but don't expect it to perform, i would sense that after running untangle on it, and then browsing through it, this box would be all shot up and left out in the desert some where holding creatures for cover :)
 
dashpuppy said:
He can put Untangle on it, but don't expect it to perform, i would sense that after running untangle on it, and then browsing through it, this box would be all shot up and left out in the desert some where holding creatures for cover :)
Click to expand...

LOL!! In so many words that's just what I said :p

I was thinking about posting a followup to my other post just to say that I've run untangle on a older dual P3 server.
Compaq DL380 G2
Specs:
Dual P3 1.26GHz
3GB ram
4x 15k 36GB SCSI in raid 5 (with one hot spare)
Dual Intel 10/100 nics built in
Broadcom 10/100/1000 NIC as well

Run untangle pretty well. Handled my 15/3 comcast line well. Though it did add ~60ms of lag to the line :(

Why am I not using it? Mainly because it consumes 34 watts just plugged into the wall!! That's more then my supermicro atom server pulls from the wall flat out.
Once the OS loads it settles out to just under 290watts (fluctuates around 287 and 288).
 
pwrusr said:
LOL!! In so many words that's just what I said :p

I was thinking about posting a followup to my other post just to say that I've run untangle on a older dual P3 server.
Compaq DL380 G2
Specs:
Dual P3 1.26GHz
3GB ram
4x 15k 36GB SCSI in raid 5 (with one hot spare)
Dual Intel 10/100 nics built in
Broadcom 10/100/1000 NIC as well

Run untangle pretty well. Handled my 15/3 comcast line well. Though it did add ~60ms of lag to the line :(

Why am I not using it? Mainly because it consumes 34 watts just plugged into the wall!! That's more then my supermicro atom server pulls from the wall flat out.
Once the OS loads it settles out to just under 290watts (fluctuates around 287 and 288).
Click to expand...


That is why next year ish, i will be buying a 1U supermicro dc atom unit :)
 
old PCs make great Linux machines for running simple services like DNS, DHCP, etc..
 
how come we are talking about "boxes" ? What kinda boxes are we talking about :p

All i see what stuffing the box :eek:
 
pwrusr said:
Why am I not using it? Mainly because it consumes 34 watts just plugged into the wall!! That's more then my supermicro atom server pulls from the wall flat out.
Once the OS loads it settles out to just under 290watts (fluctuates around 287 and 288).
Click to expand...

What he said. A 1650 will consume a decent bit of power (when my cousin snagged a Dell PowerVault 715N, it literally doubled the electric bill), plus 1U servers tend to have small, loud fans. I've picked up a lot of retired hardware to play with, but once you actually use it, you may find that you don't like having it turned on.
 
C7J0yc3 said:
Totally not where I thought we were going with that.
Click to expand...

Thought we were going the gun route?

Don't have firewall, get firewall,

if you dont have network monitoring then do the monitoring box

have both of those then get a PBX. You have firewall and monitoring so nothing left :D
 
if you have a small fishing boar]t, it would make an OK anchor? it's a bit large for a door stop. maybe if you had a table with one leg significantly shorter than the other three, you could put this server under the short leg to pro it up?
 
Yeah power usage is something I'm concerned about. Next time I go to Canadian Tire I will grab myself a decent clamp on meter so I can measure it's wattage. Or I can do it the risky way and just tap into the circuit with my regular multimeter, but it's not true RMS so don't know how good of a reading I'll get.
 
Berg0 said:
if you have a small fishing boar]t, it would make an OK anchor? it's a bit large for a door stop. maybe if you had a table with one leg significantly shorter than the other three, you could put this server under the short leg to pro it up?
Click to expand...

Actually I could use it as a rackmount shelf. LOL.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Yeah power usage is something I'm concerned about. Next time I go to Canadian Tire I will grab myself a decent clamp on meter so I can measure it's wattage. Or I can do it the risky way and just tap into the circuit with my regular multimeter, but it's not true RMS so don't know how good of a reading I'll get.
Click to expand...

Where in Canada are you ?
 
Red Squirrel said:
I was reading up on those, and apparently they aren't very accurate. Is this the case?
Click to expand...

I just use mine for rough comparison purposes, and from what I've seen it looks to do an ok job, but then again I'm just using it for a rough comparison.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Northern Ontario. In reality, our power should be cheap because it comes from hydro dams, but that's just wishful thinking, keeps going up.



I was reading up on those, and apparently they aren't very accurate. Is this the case?
Click to expand...

I'm on Vancouver Island :)
 
Red Squirrel said:
Northern Ontario. In reality, our power should be cheap because it comes from hydro dams, but that's just wishful thinking, keeps going up. :
Click to expand...


Hey we have to pay for all that nice new green energy they are putting now dont we :rolleyes:
 
It varies depending on time of day, I don't have the figures with me now, but I'll check at home.
 
according to Toronto Hydro it varies based on time of day from 5.1 to 9.9 cents/kWh
 
So at your peak rate, you're still much cheaper than Michigan, and ours is not time based. So Stop complaining! :D
 
Yeah I guess that's true, they include our delivery charge in the kWh rate, so it's about 11 cents but probably works out about the same. DTE's site says their average residential customer pays about $85/mo. which is pretty accurate for me as well.
 
pwrusr said:
That's not quite the "proper" way to dispose of old equipment.

Sure does look fun though :D
Click to expand...

haha. i know. you should check out my other videos involving tannerite......that shit is fun...you just shoot the tannerite with a high velocity round..meaning a rifle round..and boom!
 
jadams said:
Yes P3's went up to 1.2Ghz.
Click to expand...

Actually they went higher, 1.4 for the Tualatin.

OP, you're the one paying for the electricity bill (or are you?)...and dealing with the noise and space...it'll run some *nix router/firewall distros fine...but honestly you can get some nice power saving newer small boxes that will run circles around it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top