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.