I've been given a server

I've been given a server - It's an old thing that my dad used to use at his work. He thinks it might be about 10 years old. I haven't got a monitor for it yet - I'm a poor student, so I can't really afford one right now. I haven't booted it up yet, though my dad believes it's running Windows Server 2000.

I know very little about hardware. I'm trying to figure out what hardware it might have, before I do anything else. How much information will I be able to get from just looking at its insides? I know it's a Pentium 3. I know it's a Compaq. It's got six 18.2GB hard drives. It's got got a CD drive, but read only, no writer. No floppy drive, no USB.

So my questions to you guys:

1) What hardware is it likely to have? And in that case, what should I be looking for? At the moment, it's a bunch of cables and circuit boards to me.

2) I assume it's relatively easy to get a DVD drive for it?

3) What about USB ports? Can I stick some in there?

4) I've got this little media remote from my laptop (and drivers for it). Can I get an infra-red receiver or something, to get it to work?

5) What about wireless internet? It's not really feasible to run cables out to where my router is, and the router can't be moved. What are my options?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

 

1) It may be a dual-processor if it truely was a 'server', P3's stood up from the motherboard, see if it looks like there is two.

2) yup, check if it is scsi or IDE (it will predate SATA & SATAII)

3) its possible yeah, check carefully, rare not to have at least one - would be a lot easier to attach a USB multi hub externally to that - but it's likely to be only USB 1.1

4) That is likely to be a pain - personally i have always found IRDA ports to be bugggy at best.

5) Check if it has a spare PCI slot - if so you can buy a wireless card for it (if there really is no usb then you could get a PCI USB 2.0 card.

 

Are you planning to use it for a server or a desktop?

 

Right now, I'm using it as more of a glorified desktop. If I ever get a new laptop, I'll run it as a proper server.

SCSI, or so it says.

And as far as I can tell, there isn't a USB port ANYWHERE on it.

And not sure about dual processor? I'll have some IT buddies poke at it.

My dad said something about it being a P3 xeon. He said it's capable of running Vista (me being me... I'll just stick linux on it, for now).

Yeah, got some PCI slots spare.

 

A P3 running Vista would be a nightmare... especially since Vista costs more than the hardware's worth. :chk:

The specs are very similar to my own web server: About This Server - anti-trend.homelinux.org It runs CentOS 5.1 at present, and it's a great little box for LAMP -- runs 12 vhosts at present. Mine's only a dual Coppermine though; a dual-Xeon would be even faster. Let me know if you need any help getting rolling with a Linux server, I'll be glad to assist.

 

Okay, single processor only.

Managed to get it STARTED finally (many many restarts).

First time I got it going, I got a PCI Bus Parity Error PCI Slot 03. (Don't know what that means - guessing it's a hardware issue of some sort - where is slot 03?).

I can get it to boot from CD-ROM, but if I do that, it says it can't find the hard drives.