[Debian-uk] Ex-Debian AlphaServers looking for a new home

[Tim Cutts]

Hi chaps,

Last week, the debian sysadmins decommissioned the two Alpha servers that we were hosting for them, and they're now sitting idle in our data centre.  There are actually three machines, two that were the live machines and a third we kept for spares.

If you want these machines (and have the space, power and cooling for them!), please let me know, reasonably promptly.

Specs:

Machine	  goetz		    	albeniz		spare
===================================================================
Model	  ES45 model 2		ES45 model 3B	ES45 model ?
CPUS	  4xEV68 1GHz		4xEV68 1.25GHz  ?
          8MB cache each 	16MB cache each	?
RAM	  4x4GB			4x2GB		?
Disks	  2x18GB, 4x72GB	4x18GB		None
CD-ROM	  Yes			Yes		Yes
PCI cards DEGPA-TA GigE		DEGPA-TA GigE	DEGPA-TA GigE
	  DE602 100 MbitE	DE602 100 MBitE DE602 100 MBitE
						FibreChannel HBA

Each machine seems to have some sort of external SCSI connectivity too, although I couldn't identify precisely what from the SRM output.  The spare machine has no internal disks, but does appear to still have a fibre channel HBA in it.  God knows what sort.
The gigabit ethernet card is an Alteon, and we haven't been using it with Linux since licence issues caused that driver to be dropped from the Debian kernel a couple of years back.  If you build a kernel.org kernel, you can get it to work though.

CPU #3 on albeniz is currently masked out, so presumably we found it to be faulty at some point.  I tried reenabling it, and it didn't immediately fall over, so who knows.  Caveat emptor.

I've spoken to our Head of IT, and he's happy to pay to ship them within the UK, but not beyond.  Obviously we'd rather ship all three machines in one go.

Any serious offers to take them on, before we hawk them to the VMS community?

Regards,

Tim

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