What to do with an Hp Netserver LH Plus?

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edmond-@reddit

I used to install these as Y2K replacements.

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I had one of these about 20 years ago that I modified to accept an ATX motherboard (longer io shield and extra standoffs) and PSU. Then I rewired a bit in the front panel so it would have the button and led behavior an ATX motherboard needs.

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tecnolock@reddit

I retrofitted one of these in high school 98/99 to work with standard ATX boards. Threw in an old abit fatal1ty, and a 900 MHz AMD all cooled by an original Zellman‘s blue anodized aluminum tower. Man, I wish I still had that rig.

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tomxp411@reddit

Oh, that brings back memories. I used to run one of those at the real estate developer I worked for.

Personally, I'd probably either use it exactly as-is, with maybe an era-appropriate graphics card, or turn it into a sleeper with some modern hardware inside.

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F2002@reddit

God damn that's beautiful

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monkeyboywales@reddit

Just wow.

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kriebz@reddit

Install NT 4 on it?

There's a growing community of "netro" enthusiasts who love working with gear from the mid-90s to the early 2000s. Check out TheSerialPort and Clabretro on YouTube.

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postmodest@reddit

How do these people deal with the attack surface of NT4? I remember setting up a server once in the late 90's that we let finish the install plugged into the open internet while we walked across the street for subs and when we came back it had an uptime of 5 minutes and had already been rooted.

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giantsparklerobot@reddit

So you didn't 1) know what a firewall was or 2) did and didn't bother using one. I have a hard time imagining someone in 2025 setting up some retro machine that was not behind a firewall.

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suckmyENTIREdick@reddit

In the 90s, the network was a much more chill place. Port 25 was open (as was everything else), running a personal mail server was a breeze, "social media" hadn't yet entered the common vernacular, Google wasn't really a thing yet, Usenet was for discussions (and porn) instead of movies (and porn), and usually the only thing that ever saw any encryption was a payment page (if you were lucky!) -- and *that* was encumbered by export controls.

We weren't even sure if anyone but us geeks would ever take it seriously. Cities with tens of thousands of residents could be supported reasonably well with *dozens* of dial-in lines.

Back then, we pretty commonly just plugged stuff into the Internet like we did with any other network: Sometimes we used a modem for this, and sometimes we were friendly with some place that had a T1 or something and just plugged into their hub ("switch"? FFS!) and used one of their public IPs (with no condom).

This all obviously seems absurd today, but things were very different back then.

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giantsparklerobot@reddit

Don't reply to people about "the 90s" assuming they weren't themselves there. It's not only needlessly condescending but in this sub is just ridiculous.

In the 90s, which I was there for, people were just as likely as not to put machines behind a firewall of some sort. By the late 90s as the GP claims as the timeframe it was well known among anyone paid to stand up a Windows NT machine that raw dogging the Internet was not a great idea. You might have a point if they were talking about the early 90s where every desk in a company had a routable address and the Internet background radiation of malicious packets didn't exist yet.

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suckmyENTIREdick@reddit

I did no such thing as you accuse me of. I simply described the 90s.

And I described some aspects of the Internet 90s from my own perspective. And my dude: It's not like I had any fucking choice here. I can only piss with the cock I've got; I can't piss with someone else's cock.

Maybe I was a fucking blithering idiot back then (maybe I still am!), but I'm sticking with my story.

Thanks, though, for making sure to make a point of punching down. You must have thought that I needed that today. (And I definitely disagree.)

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zorinlynx@reddit

I was also there in the 90s, and I enjoyed reading your post. It's fun to reminisce, and it wasn't condescending at all. Those of us who were there should just nod solemnly.

A fun anecdote: The ISP that I used a hosted machine had everything on a bridged (not switched) subnet. So anybody on any of the hosted machines could sniff ALL traffic. And these were the days before SSH.

Let's just say hackers ran rampant on that ISP. It was utterly insane until the owner finally put everyone on switched ports at a great expense.

Ahh, the 90s. It was a fun time, but it was also horrible sometimes. :)

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suckmyENTIREdick@reddit

Thank you for understanding.

We (my friends and I) had a box or three at friendly ISPs that we'd help out with when it was useful, and we'd use these boxes for whatever.

I never wanted to sniff traffic: I certainly could have (it was just dumb hubs connecting all of this low-bandwidth gear), but meh. By being friendly and useful, and trusted, I had access to their users' passwords if I really wanted to go snooping.

I never did. I got over being nosy before I ever even had a modem: When I was 9 or 10, my grandpa gave me a digitally-programmed radio scanner for my birthday.

So I did what any normal kid should have done at that time: I programmed in all of the 10 available scanner channels to match all 10 of the full-duplex cordless phone frequencies we had at that time, and I listened and waited for someone to have some deep, dark, or sexy kind of conversation.

Nothing juicy ever happened. Just boring every-day chitter-chatter. And while I'm actually glad I did that, the exercise had no direct benefit to me.

Except: It taught me that most of what people communicate about is boring AF.

So therefore, I didn't misuse anyone's else's data, because (based experience) the juice wouldn't have been worth the squeeze. I also didn't go creeping around inside of the mail or news servers I built for one of those ISPs, even though I certainly could have.

I stil don't misuse anyone else's data -- even in data recovery operations. It's probably boring AF. (And frankly, I don't want to be involved at all in cases where it is spicy. Boring can be good.)

But you did unlock an old memory: There was one local ISP that refused to be friendly. It was the first commercial dial-up provider in the area, and they've actually survived to offer DSL and eventually WISP service, and now provide proper gigabit-ish fiber 30 years hence.

They're a survivor.

Way back when, they had one Sun Microsystems box running the whole show (logins, mail, news, web, the works), and all of us regular plebian users had shell accounts on it (as was the style at the time).

This Sun Microsystems box had a world-readable /etc/passwd file. And it did not use shadow passwords. /etc/passwd contained encrypted passwords, but they were trivial to crack, and so we cracked many of them with a dictionary attack.

I knew a guy who used the "office" account we discovered. He used this for dialup access years before he got DSL or DOCSIS or something else better-than-dialup at home.

(And oddly enough: He was a dude who was a founding partner in one of the ISPs we were friendly with. He already had free dialup: He already profited from his dialup service. Insert rich-stealing-everything-meme.jpg here.)

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postmodest@reddit

"Well only be gone for like 20 minutes!"

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SaturnFive@reddit

At least in the modern day, NT4 seems fine behind a basic home firewall and NAT.

I'm using NT4 to play music next to me and it's on the network, but there's nothing forwarded to it, and I don't go online with it except for like 3 sites that still render in IE2. 8)

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kriebz@reddit

So yeah, put it behind a dedicated firewall... but really, malware in the wild doesn't even look for it these days. It's usually safe to, say, keep stuff like this on your home LAN, but that's a decision you'll have to make for yourself.

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agrk@reddit

Separate VLAN/networks and internet through a proxy that can handle modern https for you. Also, backups. Lots of backups.

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BoltLayman@reddit

The more I watch clabretro, the more I confident we didn't miss much in those 90/2000s cracking apart :-))) Even being in 20+ toward 30s :-))) Too much vendor lock-in bull shit which in the end appeared to be non functional ewaste.

He is sacrificing his own time to save us from long hours tinkering with almost zero results. ActionRetro thank you too :-))

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suckmyENTIREdick@reddit

Eh, it was an exciting time.

Today in 2025, it is nice to just plonk down another $20 network switch and instantly have connections for 4 more PCs at up to gigabit speeds using throw-away factory made patch cords (that behave perfectly), and know that it'll work fine. It's also very boring.

Hardware was expensive, and challenging. You want internet in multiple rooms? In 1995? Hoo boy.

Ethernet was expensive. You could give an IP connection to a Windows box over RS-232 using SLIP or PPP. PLIP, using parallel ports, was faster but tended to work mostly between tinkerer *nix boxes like Linux and FreeBSD. There were no disused closet laptops to pick from or fully-functional $50 business computers on eBay (what eBay?). Used monitors were hundreds of dollars instead of five bucks at the thrift store.

Back when a 650 megabyte CD-ROM was still a monumental amount of data, I got to play with all kinds of neat stuff (including rooms with VT330 terminals connected with RS-232 to a 486 Linux box that had an 8-port BocaBoard) just to bring convenience to things like IRC and email back before networks and computers became cheap, easy, and boring.

I didn't learn soldering because I wanted a hobby. I learned to solder because the network was fucking awesome, and I needed to build my own cabling to bend it to my will.

Youtubers like clabretro and The Serial Port aren't showing us stuff with almost zero results. They're showing us the very stuff from a particular era: The results were marvelous at the time the gear was new.

(That era just happened to be \~30 years ago.)

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BoltLayman@reddit

:-) But as you can see from their videos - most of the time it doesn't work as planned from a few first attempts to launch either software or hardware. And requires a lot of troubleshooting, either from the lack of documentation or the product being too complex or difficult to understand and configure in a short time.

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suckmyENTIREdick@reddit

Oh, for sure. Absolutely.

A lot of stuff is just broken (because it is friggin' old), but still too common [or mundane] for someone David of Usagi Electric to attack it with a proper repair.

And a lot of institutional knowledge is just lost.

And research on what institutional knowledge remains is clouded by dumb memes: A person who wasn't there in the 80s or 90s might look at SCSI or 10base-T termination issues through the lens of a modern search engine, and establish that it takes no fewer than six terminators and the blood of two goats and a chicken to get the bus to work.

Documentation in particular is precarious: I owned a multi-port serial card once, with 16650 UARTs. It was a nice card, and it worked well, and I forget who made it right at this moment.

But it was developed and delivered during the Internet Age, so documentation was available online when it was new.

And I remember that this company that built it was bought by STB, and that I was able to find documentation at STB's website for jumper settings when I needed them again.

I thought, at that time, that it was really very nice that STB kept the docs online. So nice, in fact, that I emailed STB and thanked them.

I got back a pleasant reply that went something like: "Thanks! Yeah, we have no intention of taking down any of that kind of documentation. It doesn't cost us anything to host it, so why not keep it alive?"

But then 3dfx swallowed up STB, and subsequently nVidia swallowed 3dfx, and that shit is all simply gone. (It's been gone for decades at this point, but it's still gone today, too.)

(Now, that said: It's just an ISA card, right? I'm older and wiser now. I don't need the manual to figure out the IRQs -- a meter can tell me how the IRQ jumpers work. And in the worst case, I can experiment with memory address ranges. I can even automate those experiments. I can even automate it with a $2 Raspberry Pi Pico. I can even persuade ChatGPT to help write the code to automate the experiments.

Perhaps I misspoke earlier about things being boring today. Some things definitely are lividly weird these days.)

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xternocleidomastoide@reddit

I am always chuckling when people talk about the great old days of computing with thing being so much better than the hellscape of interoperating stuff that mostly just works ;-)

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nourish_the_bog@reddit

I never knew token ring networking was so involved. I'm glad I missed out, and get to watch from the sidelines

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bingojed@reddit

I worked at a large building with token-ring and we were always chasing down broken connections or bad NICs that brought down the whole network ring. Ethernet was such an upgrade in reliability.

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prefer-sativa@reddit

I worked at a financial banking software company that used IBM S/36's. IBM came out with a token ring adapter that let the 5360 talk to the world,other than SDLC.

I was the new kid on the block, programming the 36 in RPG and turbo pascal on PC's. I got to wire up the building and terminate the cable. I love twisted pair!

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musingofrandomness@reddit

Twisted pair ethernet maybe, the old 10base2 thinnet was almost as bad with bad terminators, failed NICs, and open cables.

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bingojed@reddit

Yes, terminators and t connectors were also a pain. As was twinax.

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r88dmax@reddit

Twinax and the "vampires"... what times...

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TheAgedProfessor@reddit

Token Ring was the first network I set up for our multisystem Doom death matches. It really wasn't that bad.

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cholerasustex@reddit

Me too!

I tell people about running Banyan VINES and token ring. So much effort, worth every second

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tarabuki@reddit

God yes token ring is a bitch. I started on it back in the mid 90s before we upgraded to Ethernet.

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1quirky1@reddit

25y ago my CCIE exam had token ring on it. It had AppleTalk, IPX, ATM, ATM LANE, synchronous serial, and ISDN dialup. It was missing FDDI/CDDI but I had that at work.

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felixthecat59@reddit

He could install Windows 2000 quite easily. We updraded several of the same machines for a customer running several databases. One was a pri t server, 3 were database servers for multiple office groups, 1 was an Exchange server. All drives were 32gb SCSI drives, taking advantage of the RAID capability.

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Terrible-Jellyfish79@reddit (OP)

Thanks. I will check them out.

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NetInfused@reddit

WOW, good memories! Back in the day I was setting up NetWare 4.11 on these machines! They were rock solid servers...

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Blackholeofcalcutta@reddit

Back in the day, the dustiest (furriest) server in the computer room or in the broom closet at a law office was frequently a NetWare server that hadn’t seen a reboot since last Christmas. What a rock solid OS. Still remember the screeds from the local CNEs talking about how Microsoft stole AD from NDS.

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Terrible-Jellyfish79@reddit (OP)

Extremely heavy. Difficult to move because it has no casters.

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randylush@reddit

Just need a $700 wheel kit!

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Cwc2413@reddit

I thought the same. Netware was such a great platform for the time. We had many of these little beasts that ran like a dream!

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vdh1979@reddit

I used to support one of these, had SCO Unix on it

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FAMICOMASTER@reddit

NT4 Server and host a website

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aliendude5300@reddit

If you want an honest answer, it's going to use so much electricity and provide poor performance per watt, anything more than just playing around with it is impractical

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bjazmoore@reddit

I bought two of these pack to the gills with RAM and drives and the fastest Xeons I could get. They were incredible.

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Metalorg@reddit

It is beautiful

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kdekorte@reddit

Haven’t seen EISA slots in a long time

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blakewantsa68@reddit

Do you have a boat that is in danger of floating away?

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siddfinch@reddit

Run Novell on it? I am fairly sure that is one of the last systems I had maintained a Novell server on.

I need a nap.

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Narrow_Ambassador_66@reddit

Use it as a playstation /s

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Soft_Association_615@reddit

netserve on it?

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darkelfbear@reddit

To quote the greatest archeologist to ever live: "It belongs in a museum!"

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Mammoth_Ad5012@reddit

What a beast!! I’d turn it into a localised home Ai host personally lots of room for every possible hardware requirement. I’d definitely not let that go to waste!

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BoltLayman@reddit

I was a kid when Novel blossomed. What was the point? Okay, I understand it offered a lot for MS DOS or Windows 3.11 clients, but later developments of WinNT....

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m-in@reddit

Novell’s OS was fairly well engineered and these servers were rock-solid. You could log in to a Novell network from NT 4 no problem. I saw Novell login agents on machines at a hospital in the US sometime between 2004 and 2007

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Gr8fulFox@reddit

Yeah, my school ran Novell with bootstrapped Win2K machines until 2007, then switched to an all Microsoft system.

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LisiasT@reddit

Get 4 units of this 4 2.5hds to 5.25 bay adapters:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805106586328.html

And shove 16 2T 2.5 HDs on this thing, as well enough PCI SATA adapters for all of them:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803292340413.html

(this adapter can handle only 2T drives)

Now you will still have 2 5.25 bay, and there're these 2 SCSI connectors on the motherboard beging for being used.

Take 2 of these things:

https://global.icydock.com/product_361.html

And two SATA to SCSI adapters:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/153621055308

And add 4 more 2TB (or highter?) sata 2.5 drives, but configuring the enclosure to RAID0 for speed to leverage these marvelous SCSI channels.

You may also want to replace that PCI ethernet adapter with EISA ones, they are pretty cheap:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/153777600747

Tale at least 2, but you have slots to spare - consider shoving 5, one for administation and 4 to deliver content for your home (spread the clients between different networks to maximize troughtput).

And you will have a PCI or EISA slot to spare for something else.

And you are set! Probably the dumbest way to serve 40TB under home lab NAS, but hell, it is the best way I could think to waste money on an old server!! :)

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boluserectus@reddit

The noise! The weight! The power consumption!

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LisiasT@reddit

Yeah, marvelous no? :D

We don't drive 70's muscle cars for their fuel efficiency, do we? :P

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m-in@reddit

I’m gonna save this because that level of over-retro-engineering is not what I would easily come up with. Excellent idea!

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ADAMSMASHRR@reddit

Clean it, cherish it

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Mega_play4r_862@reddit

uh, whatever you want. im not ur mom.

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NotJustJohnSmith@reddit

Do you have a boat ? That will be a fine anchor

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kissmyash933@reddit

Get your NetWare 3.12 or 4.11 on!

Stuff that bad boy full of drives, clean it out, get a 16/4 Token Ring card and run it as a router between your old and new networks, netboot your IBM PS/2’s off of it, use it as a power hungry file server for your DOS and early windows systems.

I’d have a ton of fun with this one!

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colenski999@reddit

Storytime, in 2003 the company building that I was admining this server in was struck by lightning and it zapped this server, which was the primary DC, it has redundant power supplies, and fun fact, it only runs if you have *two* redundant PSU's in it, 1 was gone, 1 was still good but it would not power up. Sourcing a new PSU for this was a PITA and was going to take weeks - I would up buying it off of ebay, weeks later.

But I had to get this thing running, I noticed the motherboard had an AT style power connector so I ripped off the cover, plugged in a regular AT power supply hanging off the side, said a hail mary and hit the power switch.

It worked! Booted up perfectly and started up right away! And I ran this Frankenstein's Monster POS for weeks until we got the new PSU

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Gadgetman_1@reddit

Compaq Proliant 1600 I think it was, had an option for a 3x Hot-plug PSU config. It could run just fine on 2 of the PSUs, but if it was rebooted, it would hang during POST and require someone to press F1 or something. Thank F! for the first gen ILO...

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colenski999@reddit

hahaha "redundant" well its not redundant if the redundant one doesnt work...

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

That is absolutely insane!

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RebeccaBlue@reddit

Install Novel Netware 3.12.

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maximpactbuilder@reddit

ftw

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DNSGeek@reddit

Those things make amazing space heaters in the winter.

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mattk404@reddit

I want a coffee table made with two of those!

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LaundryMan2008@reddit

I would take a very deep rackmount server and place it over the top with a sheet of plexiglass instead of the original cover

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Terrible-Jellyfish79@reddit (OP)

I think that would work because they are very solid.

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mattk404@reddit

Exactly, wife would accept after enough time, I hope!

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LaundryMan2008@reddit

I would host a game on it and have the sickest LAN party running off of this server if it’s capable of doing that

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dobe33@reddit

I have one in storage, 3 drive with nt server running

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DeepDayze@reddit

I've seen these things when working in one of IBM's data centers which hosts clients' equipment. They are monsters!

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NDLunchbox@reddit

At my last job we had a few NetServers laying around that had wheels on them. I put a monitor and keyboard on one and used to push it around the rows of racks to troubleshoot DL3x0's when iLO stopped working.

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m5online@reddit

Coffee Table

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wheresthetux@reddit

Lovely machine. Look at all those expansion slots. :D

It looks to be in good condition. Start with some canned air and a damp rag. I bet it cleans up nice.

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KAPT_Kipper@reddit

Flashback for me. Used to run a Novel 3.12 server on one of these. Rock solid computer.

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calculatetech@reddit

Install Netware and share Doom to DOS computers. Just Doom, nothing else.

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MasterKnight48902@reddit

Use it as a file server or Minecraft server

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johnklos@reddit

Easy - net serve!

I bet NetBSD would run decently on that box.

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Regular-Let1426@reddit

What sort of storage capacity was in these? Was it raided?

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rosmaniac@reddit

Wide SCSI on SCA-80 connectors for the backplane. Motherboard ports aren't RAID-capable as I recall. We had one of these at work years ago; dual Pentium 133. It had six 146GB SCSI drives.

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spacesluts@reddit

If only we had Plex for win 9x

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Exshot32@reddit

Transcoding at a blazing 30 seconds per frame!

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Mysterious-Alps-5186@reddit

Turn it into the ultimate xp machine

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MaridAudran@reddit

I haven't seen one of these since 1999. I remember setting up an entire data center with these with Novell Netware, only for the IT manager to change his mind and want them all switched to Citrix.

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Terrible-Jellyfish79@reddit (OP)

How on earth did you move them?

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MaridAudran@reddit

Rebuild them one at a time. They hired a Citrix engineer to come in and help. Then I was supposed to maintain them. Not long afterward I left. I was hired to manage netware servers and managewise pc fleet management. With no netware servers, no netware drivers/agents, hence no control with managewise. Interestingly enough, Years later I was working for a GSI and was invited to a sales meeting with that company I used to work for because the new manager was someone I used to work with. He said the place was a mess, he had to rip out and replace the Citrix systems and had no pc management. I felt bad for him.

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LateralLimey@reddit

I supported these when they were newish, along with LH Pros and LX Pros. Nothing like a 4 way Pentium Pro Processor MPS machine on wheels.

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ZaitsXL@reddit

It should be loud as hell when turned on

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JustADad66@reddit

OMG. I remember working on those with Novell and NT 35 and 4.0

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senrew@reddit

I have been pondering setting up a retro server to run an isolated network just for my old machines. Probably Server 2000 to be able to support appletalk for my old macs as well. The youtubers that u/kriebz mentioned have been a baaaaaaad influence lately.

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