Right, so I was given an IBM eServer xSeries 226, manufactured in 2004. It spent its life as an active directory server running Windows Server 2003 at the offices of a museum, up until 2011 when it was replaced. After that it sat in a corner for 15 years, waiting to be scrapped. Along came I and snatched it up before it would meet its maker. (If that would ever happen tbh)
Hardware Configuration
It's a fairly well configured system, being only 32-bit. It has *some* 3GHz Intel Xeon CPU that's either dual-core, or single-core with HT (which is more likely). The system doesn't report which model it is, helpfully enough. And I have not removed the cooler to check. But being from 2004, I assume it's some Pentium 4 based core.
It has 3GB of DDR2 ECC-RAM, which is plenty.
There are three 73GB Ultra320 SCSI-drives in a RAID1 with a hot spare. This array used to be the only and main storage in the server in its previous life.
Hardware Configuration changes and thoughts
I added a new 960GB SSD from Kioxia to use as both system drive and general storage. It should be sufficient for a long time to come.
The RAID array is still in use, however. I partitioned and formatted the volume to use as general storage. At the moment it's storing the Movie Night files.
I do like old SCSI RAID arrays, but they are prone to failure, and two decades later I really don't trust it very much. Hence the low priority storage.
Software
I quickly found out it did not even attempt to boot directly from a USB stick. (Was worth a shot) So I had two options; Either write a bootable floppy disk with the Plop Bootmanager, which at that moment felt like a bit of a chrore. So I did the more sensible thing.
Remeber burning optical discs? Yeah okay, you probably do. Who am I kidding, honestly.. Anyways! I threw a DVD-R into a modern-ish system, burned the ISO to it, realized the server only had a CD-ROM drive, dug up a 650MB Kodak CD-R from 1999 (lol) and burned the ISO to that. I then found out the internal optical drive didn't quite work. So I did the usual dangling-another-optical-drive-out-the-side-of-the-case method. This worked fine.
I proceeded to install the OS, which ended up being Debian 12.5 32-bit, with no desktop enviroment installed.
I installed the Apache webserver, MySQL and PHP to complete the ever elusive LAMP-stack.
The phpBB forum software package was then taped on top of it all, to bring you this wonderfully outdated online experience that has somehow managed to live and thrive (mostly twitch along) to this day.
And here it sits, just to the left of its new friends, under a desk.
