Sorry, butter fingers I hit send instead of return somehow. <br><br>Here are the secs:<br><br>2 - 866 MHz Pentium Processors<br>Bus 133MHz<br>cache 256 KB<br>2048 MB ECC SDRAM<br>built in adaptec hardware RAID controller<br>

SCSI dual channel backplane - w/1 daughter card installed<br>    (Only one channel is available with only 1 daughter card)<br>4 - 3.5 hot swap drivebays <br>Backplane is SCSI 80pin sockets and takes Ultra2, ultra160, ultra320 drives<br>

<br>Drives that came with it:<br>1 - 73GB Ultra320<br>1 - 34GB Ultra320<br>2 - 17GB Ultra160&#39;s<br><br>Case is a 2U Dell case with 2 power supplies - tied into a redundant board <br>Optical drive and room for one more 3.5 bay under the optical.<br>

<br>This rack server is a Tank.  I know a lot of businesses that have used these in the past on Windows server systems.<br><br>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&#39;t really lend much for a quality RAID.  Buying larger Ultrascsi disks (320 GBO) or higher is very cost prohibitive.<br>

<br>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&#39;s and use software RAID, but I would be losing probably the most valuable thing on the system the hardware controller and backplane system.<br>

<br>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.<br>

<br>Any thoughts/recommendations on re-tasking this beast? <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 2:20 PM, James Dugger <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:james.dugger@gmail.com" target="_blank">james.dugger@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br>

<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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.<br>

<br>Here are the secs:<br><br>
2 - 866 MHz Pentium Processors <br>Bus 133MHz<br>cache 256 KB <br>2048 MB ECC SDRAM<br>built in adaptec hardware RAID controller<br>SCSI dual channel backplane - w/1 daughter card installed <br><br>4 - 3.5 hot swap drivebays <br>

<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>James<br><br><br>
</font></span></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>James<br><br><br>