Friday, December 30, 2011

World of Warcraft old blade server

Woo! I got an old server World of Warcraft server for Christmas. As expected, it came without hard drives or any way to plug it in. All the servers that were auctioned off were intended for display only. I'm toying with the idea of getting it running, although if I can get it working I probably won't benefit too much. But it will be awesome.

Blizzard auctioned off old World of Warcraft servers a few months ago http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3710218. The server I have was Rexxar, according to it's plaque it was in service from February 10th, 2006 to June 9th, 2010. I leveled up my main on it a few years ago before transferring it off to join some of my guild migrating from a different MMO, Guild Wars. The servers they auctioned off were all pretty old HP Blade servers, I don't know much about them but it sounds like they were powerful servers in their time, power hogs and very noisy. Unfortunately, I haven't found any good sources of information about Blade servers yet, I tried contacting HP support but they haven't gotten back to me yet.

My blade server has three main ports I've found. One on the front, which I assume is for plugging in a terminal. Two in the back, one looks very much like a power port and the other is probably for data. I assume when the server lives in a rack, the power would plug into 48v DC and the data port would plug into some sort of very fast ethernet (I found at least one thing claiming this model used gigabit). I imagine I could hack power together to boot up the server, but I have no idea how I'd interface with it or connect it to the internet yet. Also, I don't know how well the server tolerates variances in voltage. Ideally I'll be able to find a small Blade server rack, but it doesn't look like any small ones exist. Maybe I'll get lucky and I'll run into someone with a space server rack. I'd love to be able to host stuff on an old WoW server.

2 comments:

  1. Are you bringing it to MIT? I want to see!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Planning on it, although I need to find a place for it in my room...

    ReplyDelete