My work had this old Proliant 6000 server tucked away in the basement after we decided that it wasn’t worth putting it in a rack so I decided to give it a home lest it be used for Server Wars.

For the last 2 days, I’ve been attempting to install the NIC drivers for this beast on Windows Server 2003. Going to HP’s site, I saw that all models of the 6000 were supported and used the same driver, but naturally it doesn’t work that way. I tried this file, this file, and even this file. Naturally, nothing worked. Finally at this late hour, I noticed that the dual 400Mhz models uses a Netelligent 10/100TX UTP PCI Controller instead of the NC31xx Fast Ethernet. For some reason they don’t have those drivers for Windows Server 2003, but I was able to use the Windows 2000 Server drivers instead. Now I know why people get frustrated with technology. Incredible!