They have a secondary motherboard that hosts the Slot CPUs, 4 single core P3 Xeons. I also have the Dell equivalent model but it has a bum mainboard.

With those 90’s systems, to get Windows NT to use more than 1 core, you have to get the appropriate Windows version that actually supports them.

Now you can simply upgrade from a 1 to a 32 core CPU and Windows and Linux will pick up the difference and run with it.

In the NT 3.5 and 4 days, you actually had to either do a full reinstall or swap out several parts of the Kernel to get it to work.

Downgrading took the same effort as a multicore windows Kernel ran really badly on a single core system.

As for the Sun Fires, the two models I mentioned tend to be highly available on Ebay in the 100-200 range and are very different inside than an X86 system. You can go for 400 or higher series to get even more difference, but getting a complete one of those can be a challenge.

And yes, the software used on some of these older systems was a challenge in itself, but they aren’t really special, they are pretty much like having different vendors RGB controller softwares on your system, a nuisance that you should try to get past.

For instance, the IBM 5000 series raid cards were simply LSI cards with an IBM branded firmware.

The first thing most people do is put the actual LSI firmware on them so they run decently.

Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

For history and “how things changed”, go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000’s (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90’s (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

x86 computers haven’t changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we’ve been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.

You should replace that thing with something more modern. I had a 5000p chipset system someone gave me with dual quad cores and an assload of ram.

The shitty box idled over 400W. I went as far as getting low power ram and the newest CPU it would support that also supported frequency and power scaling and it still used over 400W on idle.

This while I had a Xeon E5 box that was only a few years younger that uses more in the neighborhood of 50W on idle and utterly decimates the 5000 series box in CPU performance.

You’re probably better of fetching some old Ryzen 1800x system of ebay for higher performance and leagues lower power consumption.

As for the raid, don’t use it. Hardware raid has always been shit and in modern Linux and Windows is as good as completely depricated.

Have to say, this is not the most convoluted way of testing a simple thing I’ve seen in my years, not by a long shot.

Not always, but whenever we did the “lets put the dictator on a remote island” or similar thing, they came back, with a vengeance.

Heavy?

For some measly Macbook or style over substance laptop maybe, but I can’t say I’ve ever had any sort of trouble running it on any of my hardware, laptops included.

Granted, my start in IT 3 decades ago was as a solo admin for a medium sized company after having been a gamer and overclocker for years before that, I know as much about the actual hardware I work with as I do about programming.

And from what I run into in the field, especially these days, the vast majority of developers wouldn’t even know how to install an OS or know what hardware is in the system they use, it’s pretty much “laptop goes brrrrr” and that’s about it. No wonder most devs these days write absolutely horrible code in terms of optimization and resource usage.

Mostly Visual Studio Ultimate for general workloads, regardless of what I’m writing for, it has the facilities to support pretty much every compiler and format.

For quickly editing / patching some source on Linux, just plain Nano.

Otherwise, these days, mainly VSCode.

But if I get into an environment where it’s another IDE, I wouldn’t care either way.

I’m language and editor agnostic and use editors out of convenience (like having Visual Studio Ultimate available to me) and languages depending on what is most appropriate for the task.

My biggest pet peeve in development is that people keep shoehorning their preferred language onto any task.

This.

Seriously, people, start filtering out who gets to tell you shit.

Of course, don’t overdo it and create an echo chamber for yourself, block the extremes, but don’t block basic disagreement.

I started doing this years ago, primarily on Twitch.

I despise copy pastas and edgelord comments, it’s why I generally watch streamers that have a relatively chill and small audience.

But I do go into Kripps chat simply to fill up my block list with people that relentlessly spam chats with copy pastas and other similar sorts of comments.

Later I started being a bit more gung-ho doing the same on all platforms and it made all types of social media oh so much better.

You’ll quickly notice that a lot of the comments that put your teeth on edge came from the same few loud and obnoxious people, because once you start blocking people like that, after just 10-20 of them, the comments you see are already far more palatable.

Best thing is, the accounts that do this get taken down at spectacular speeds.

I’ve been in IT all my life, starting in the mid 80’s. Got an extensive home lab and host pretty much everything you tend to use as SAAS these days at home too. Home mail, cloud, web based office suite, etc.

But for the “what if your ISP goes down”, well, then I switch to my neighbors ISP XD.

There’s dozens of ISPs of various sizes where I live and there’s neighbors representing 8 of these ISPs. I have access to all their networks (most of them gave access).

So if my ISP goes down, I switch to another one.

That said, I haven’t had an outage longer than 30 minutes in 5 years and the average time between shorter outages (quick resets to minutes long) happen 1ce a year or so.

There are some announced outages, usually once per quarter, for network upgrades and system maintenance. But generally, my ISP has a 99,99% uptime.