They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

In my case, when they do spring cleaning where I work, it is like a nerd gold mine. Over the years I have rescued and resuscitated several old computers from the e-waste recycling bin and put them to good use.

We are running most of our web servers at LittleBytesOfPi.net using some old Getac E100 rugged tablet computers rescued from the recycling bin.

These machines, which originally came with Windows XP, are not very powerful by today’s standards having only an 800 MHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. Similar to today’s inexpensive single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi and the Beagle Bone Black.  The Mini Server Farm is part of our effort to explore what is possible using a low horsepower Linux device.

These old machines can run most of the latest Linux distributions we tried, including Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS and openSUSE.  Our favourite distribution is Linux Mint, because it seems to work best out of the box with our old recycled hardware. 

Channeling my inner Whiz Kid, I used a couple of these machines to create my own rack space at home.

The machine on top is serving up the web page you are looking at. The machine on the bottom is running our VOIP server.

We have some additional servers on the private side of our LAN to use for testing VOIP applications.  You can safely run an Asterisk telephone server on your home network without exposing it to connections from the outside.  We have been running Asterisk on a Raspberry Pi for a local area network PBX.

Our web servers share the same outside internet connection as our home computers. To keep our home computers safe from hacking, the internet exposed side of our network is isolated from the private side of our network, as described in our tutorial here.

Our Mini Server Farm rack shares space in my home office with my other nerdy projects. These days they mostly involve building robots out of Legos and controlling them with our Raspberry Pi computers.