Sorry, butter fingers I hit send instead of return somehow. Here are the secs: 2 - 866 MHz Pentium Processors Bus 133MHz cache 256 KB 2048 MB ECC SDRAM built in adaptec hardware RAID controller SCSI dual channel backplane - w/1 daughter card installed (Only one channel is available with only 1 daughter card) 4 - 3.5 hot swap drivebays Backplane is SCSI 80pin sockets and takes Ultra2, ultra160, ultra320 drives Drives that came with it: 1 - 73GB Ultra320 1 - 34GB Ultra320 2 - 17GB Ultra160's Case is a 2U Dell case with 2 power supplies - tied into a redundant board Optical drive and room for one more 3.5 bay under the optical. This rack server is a Tank. I know a lot of businesses that have used these in the past on Windows server systems. My first thought was a NAS server however to take full advantage of hardware RAID I would need to find a second daughter card to take fully use the dual channel backplane and controller it will work as one channel but just slower. Also since the drives are 1 - old, 2 - small in size, and 3 - different sizes they don't really lend much for a quality RAID. Buying larger Ultrascsi disks (320 GBO) or higher is very cost prohibitive. I could try and pull out the backplane add a PCI SATA controller card and populate the drive bays with 3.5 inch SATA HDD's and use software RAID, but I would be losing probably the most valuable thing on the system the hardware controller and backplane system. I have thought maybe of using it as a VPN server running OpenVPN and setting it up as an edgerouter. I have installed a minimal copy of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server on it and it is running okay though there are times when it boots into buzybox and gives me the initramfs prompt. I believe that this is because Grub times out before the hardware RAID controller spins up the boot drive. Any thoughts/recommendations on re-tasking this beast? On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 2:20 PM, James Dugger wrote: > I have inherited a Dell PowerEdge 2450 and want to re-task it somewhere in > my network running as a linux server. It was being used two months ago as > a VPN server running Windows 2003 Server. > > Here are the secs: > > 2 - 866 MHz Pentium Processors > Bus 133MHz > cache 256 KB > 2048 MB ECC SDRAM > built in adaptec hardware RAID controller > SCSI dual channel backplane - w/1 daughter card installed > > 4 - 3.5 hot swap drivebays > > > -- > James > > > -- James