1U Rackmount servers for sale

[Jon Pruente]

Some of you may know of Kozoru.  Some of you may know that they are in
hard times.  Thus, they are selling their cluster nodes.  I can have
one in your hand for $200.  A good friend of mine worked there until a
few months ago, and we are looking to turn around some of the
machines.  Here is what he had to say about them:

It's been a while (March or so) since I threw one together but I know
they're P4 Celerons with 80GB PATA drives. I think all of them have
256MB (1 stick) of RAM but I know some of the DB Servers had two 256's
in them. You might get lucky there.<br>
<br>
I *THINK* CPU speed is 2.8GHz but it might be slower. this is the only
thing I can't remember about them from memory. On-board USB/Video/PS2
and 100BTX NIC.<br>
<br>
They're built in cheapish SuperMicro cases and they're pretty noisy,
they use a big blower fan for the case, a small whiny low-profile
blower fan on the copper heatsink, and the powersupply has its on set
of fans. These ran 24/7 for damn near 2 years straight, we seldomnly
had any problems with them (2 out of 100+ had power supplies die)<br>
<br>
They all boot off USB, so just add a USB DVD drive and install your OS
of choice.<br>

He's got a post over at kcgeek.com that says the exact same thing.
I think they are similar to <a
href="http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/1U/512/SC512L.cfm">these
1U cases</a>, but I've never seen one in person, only photos.  From
what I've been told, they had been setup to boot a custom OpenBSD
install from a 64MB USB key, and use the HDD for local data cache,
storage, etc. when the cluster node was active.  I can get them for
pretty cheap.  There are/were nearly 100 available.  I don't have any
idea how long these will last, as the (former?) Kozoru employees can
get them even cheaper than I can.  Contact me or ax0n (on kcgeek.com)
if you're interested in one/a few.  If you contact him, be sure to say
you heard of these through me, though. ;)

Thanks,
Jon.