While out patrolling my neighborhood…really just taking a walk after dinner, I spotted something interesting by the curb. There were what appeared to be several rack mounted servers (well, they weren’t currently mounted…). Either our neighborhood was built on some ancient computer server burial ground and they were rising from the dead, or less likely, someone was throwing them out. Either way, I grabbed them…or at least hauled them off the ground with great force…these things were heavy…or they just didn’t want to let go…
All in all there were 5 different machines. Here I’ll cover the first…what turned out to be a Dell PowerEdge 2550. This computer was made in the early 2000s. The PowerEdge 2550 was introduced on March 27th 2001 according to this article at a base price of $2499. While the article mentions CPUs ranging from 700 MHz to 1 GHz, I believe the lowest end PowerEdge models came with a 933 MHz CPU and they supported up to 1.4 GHz CPUs. ServerWorks Corp.’s HE-SL chipset also supported up to 4 GB of RAM (most desktops of the era only supported 512 MB to 2 GB if you were lucky), a dual channel raid with battery backup and 3 PCI buses (2 64-bit and 1 32-bit). This one seemed to have 2 CPUs in it. At least I could see two heatsinks and two voltage regulator modules (VRMs). The previous caretaker had wisely removed the hard drives. These would have been SCSI drives with particular hot swap caddies for this dell model (and maybe others) so it wasn’t something I just had lying around. Nevertheless, I hooked up a monitor, keyboard and mouse and turned it on to see what would happen…
To my surprise, it posted and even though it had nothing to boot, I could enter the BIOS and see what was here. It reported 1 933 MHz Pentium III CPU and 1.5 GB of RAM. Why it cannot see the other CPU I have not figured out yet. There are no error beeps or messages displayed, it’s just as if that 2nd CPU which I can clearly see is not really there. I tried reseating the VRMs with no effect. The processor in the #1 spot must be the one working because otherwise the machine wouldn’t boot at all. At some point I’ll remove the CPU and heatsink of the 2nd CPU and maybe try reseating it.
Unfortunately, this machine will not boot from USB. I guess there were a few options at this point. I could try to grab an appropriate drive off of eBay or elsewhere, stick in a SATA PCI card and drive (which I do happen to have around), or, since it did have a CD-ROM drive, burn a Linux live cd of some flavor. I chose the last option. Being an old machine with what is an apparently poorly supported graphics chip in Linux (it has a Rage XL chip on the motherboard) made this task more difficult than it should have been. Sadly, major Linux distributions seem to be ending 32-bit support which doesn’t help things either.
I first tried several relatively recent distributions either designed to work well with older machines or just to be lightweight in general. These included Amtix, Xubuntu, and various flavors of Puppy Linux. They all seemed to have more or less the same problem. The boot process would stop when it came to loading the GUI. In some cases the GUI would briefly appear before dropping to a black screen or text logon prompt. I believe the reason for this is the Rage XL graphics chip this thing uses. Finally, I tried an older version of Xubuntu I had lying around (12.04). To my surprise it loaded fine.
Given that I had no hard drive for this machine, I decided to see if I could get persistence working with the live CD and a USB drive. Unfortunately, I could never get that to work. Speed probably would not have been remotely acceptable anyway. That meant any applications I installed or data I created would be lost on shutdown or reboot. I decided to check out eBay to see if I could find a reasonably priced drive. I needed one or more Ultra 3/Ultra 160 or Ultra 320 SCSI drive. At first all I could find were overpriced drives. At least they were prices I wasn’t willing to pay. But in a day or two I found a buy it now auction for 4 drives for around $10 plus shipping and they even included the appropriate caddies for the PowerEdge 2550. That seemed like a pretty good bargain so I grabbed them. When the package showed up at my door, there was even an extra drive so I had a total of five Ultra 160 drives of ~36 GB each of various brands. Since I wasn’t planning to run a raid or anything I only really needed one but including shipping they averaged out to less than $5 each so I’m happy. Maybe I’ll see if I can find an inexpensive SCSI card or few and use these in some other old computers.
I plugged one of the drives in, booted from the Xubuntu 12.04 live CD and was able to install without any problems. The only real oddity is that the boot process seems to timeout. I wind up at an initramfs prompt or a blank screen. Typing ‘exit’ in either case results in the system continuing to boot normally. I’m not sure exactly what causes that and it doesn’t happen when booting from CD but it doesn’t seem to be a hardware problem as everything works as expected from that point on.
After the OS was installed, I did what I always do when reviving an old piece of hardware. I installed BOINC on it to see what projects I can get it to run. As with Linux, 32-bit support in BOINC (or at least in the projects that use BOINC) seems to be getting more uncertain. Many times projects will claim to have applications that support 32-bit but don’t work quite right at the end of the day. Work units will error out quickly (if you are lucky) or at the very end (if you are not). Seti@home was the best at supporting old hardware but it has entered “hibernation” and is no longer an option. Rosetta@home also used to do a pretty good job with old hardware and it even adjusts work unit sizes to complete in a certain time on whatever machine you have. However, ever since they added COVID-19 related work units, the memory requirements have gone way up and it doesn’t seem to work well on older systems. I’ve started to see work units arrive on older systems again recently though so all is not lost. I’ve had better luck with Einstein@home, NFS@home and yoyo@home. Not that you will get any great amount of credit using the likes of a Pentium III but if I’m going to have it on playing with it, it might as well be doing something useful.
Hardware includes the following:
CPU: 933 MHz Pentium III (two of them but one is non-functional for some reason)
Memory: 1.5 GB (2 x 256 MB 133 MHz SDRAM and 2 x 512 MB 133 MHz SDRAM)
Video: Rage XL
Storeage:
Hitachi Ultrastar DK32EJ-36NC 36.9 GB SCSI Ultra 160 hard drive
Floppy: 3.5″ 1.44 MB
Samsung SN-124 24x slimline CD-ROM drive
Dell PowerVault 100T DD-4/ARCHIVE Python 06408-XXX tape drive
As far as Pentium IIIs go, this is a pretty nice one as it must be the Coppermine T model which supports SMP and motherboards designed for Tualatin CPUs but it also supports motherboards designed for the older Coppermine CPUs. This CPU has the same 256K of cache as the Coppermine. Later Tualatin based CPUs eventually raised that to 512k.
I thought about trying to use that tape drive to back up some stuff but with a capacity of 20 GB (40 GB compressed) and tapes that cost ~$25 each, it doesn’t really seem worth it.
For more information on the hardware in this specific machine, see the output from lshw or HardInfo. Or you can check out how it is doing in regards to BOINC activity.
At some point, I’ll take this thing apart for some more maintenance. I still want to try to figure out why the second CPU is invisible to the system. I will also contemplate upgrading the RAM to the max of 4 GB if I can find it cheap enough.
Dell PowerEdge 2550 specifications: dell-poweredge-2550-spec
Dell PowerEdge 2550 User’s Guide: poweredge-2550_user’s guide_en-us
