With my beautiful, sexy, Compaq ProLiant 1600 not curranty posting and not having the time to troubleshoot it I found myself in need of a server to store files on my retro network.
Enter the Dell PowerEdge R210.

I've got 3 of these. They spent their lives in restaurants paired with a R710. The R710's were the main server the main POS system, however the table booking system and kitchen order screen's were done by a competing POS system that was on these r210's. Neither system really pushed the hardware but the site this server came from was cramped and dusty.

Warranty started 11/05/10. That's 10 years to the day! and roughly about the time the restaurant opened. It was decommissioned 21/06/16 and ended up in my hands not long after spending its time since in storage.

It's only single socket and no redundant power supply. but I can forgive that on such a small server. The only thing I don't like is lack of hot swap hard drives. I can't really criticize Dell for that though as the standard Dell HDD caddy would be to tall for the case! Seriously its about the same dimensions as a large Pizza box Even still that is the number 1 hardware fault on a server.

Anyway enough rambling, specs of this one is
CPU: X3430 2.40Ghz
RAM: 4x 1GB DDR3 UDIMM's
HDD: 2x 230GB SATA in Mirror
Video: Onboard Matrox G200

and best of all it has iDrac Enterprise.

The basic version allows you to remotely power on/off via a web browser but Enterprise also allows you to connect iso and disk images as a virtual drive and boot off them 😀
It also lets you remote onto the desktop although your best off sticking with 32bit version of IE for this.

Hardware wise I've done little to it as it is only short term for now. It actually shipped with 2x 2GB sticks of ram but I've a number of similar T5500's and R710's with RAM and CPU's been canablised and swapped around as needed. This wont need 4GB for what I'm using it for but like the idea of maxing out Win03.

Drac has been updated to 2.92 Build 5 and BIOS to 1.12.0 both freely available on Dells site (unlike other server brands...HP!) everything else was upto date already.
It's all setup in it's now home. it JUST fits between the wall and the desk which was lucky I was expecting to have to put it up horizontal.

Next post I'll talk about installing windows using its party trick the "lifecycle controller"