Day before yesterday got home from the office and found my dev server down. OK, probably a power out. Repeated attempts to power it back up failed. I thought aha! dead cmos battery (the pc is really old), went out bought a new battery at the drugstore, stuffed it in, still didn't power on. Then it occurred to me, the psu fan wasn't spinning up anymore. OK, the psu is dead or some such (a couple of leds on the mb light up but that's it). PSU is probably irreplaceable on the weirdo SFF hpaq office pc. Moved onto the next hpaq office pc. Wouldn't power on, at all. Moved on to my most recent previous pc, an old AM2 minitower. Pretty sure that would work! Nooooo. Powered up with repeated long beeps, and no post. After re-learning the mb model and bios, I discovered this means a hsf/overheating issue. Sho' nuff when I popped the case the hsf was flopping loose on the mount where a small plastic tab had broken off. The one that the hsf attaches to. FUCK! I can buy a replacement mount online fairly cheaply, but I'm considering replacing the mb instead. In the meantime, I do not have a standalone development server.*

*I was able to pull the drive and recover all files from the server. At least.

I thought a dead CMOS would only lose settings/time, not prevent power up?

Yeah, magical thinking.  LMAO

Found a great source for dead-cheep pcs ... https://freegeektoronto.org

charity -- they do some kind of computer recycling & educating stuff

Heading over there tomorrow to check out some bright prospects

Bought a shiny old Acer Aspire AX3810 for < Can.$30 & got it up and running.

After unsuccessfully faffing around with vnc and smb (client firewall shite?), I got nfs and http servers up, the bare minimum for this thing to work as a drop-in replacement.

It's pre-loaded with Linux Mint, an Ubuntu clone/reskin of dubious value (the reskin, that is). I was sorely tempted to nuke it for a clean install but Mister Lazy, hypervisor of my id interceded. It configures pretty much exactly like Ubuntu with 99.99% of everything pulled from Ubuntu repositories. Dumb, useless, but it does work. I guess not subject to Ubuntu's lame attempts at monetization, so that's something.

Slow AF but with 8G of RAM I expect it will do.

Quad core, 2.33GHz. I'd have given my right arm for that back when all I had was a 386SX. 

Mint's value is as a way to wean people off Ubuntu/Windows - and as a stepping stone Cinnamon is ok, but I wouldn't run it on a server.

Wonder if there's any places like FreeGeek around here...

Free Geek is awesome! I might volunteer there, and spread my brand of brazen ignorance among the underclasses. Apart from it being a 90-minute commute.

It turns out I probably would have spent less time on configuring a clean install as I have on a 'few, minor tweaks' to mint just so I can get it to serve vnc. Which isn't fait accompli by any means.

The gpu is even worse, it only does the desktop in software rendering, which looks like shit. Not a deal-breaker for a headless server though.

The box is real pretty, and real small, deffo the smallest desktop I've owned.