Local library has decades old server running,and they don't know what it's doing

As a an intern in an IT summer job in one of the offices from the company that invented the airbag (which had offices in multiples countries etc), the only week I was alone for the whole week, I received a call at 9AM, in english (I'm french and we where in an office in france), where some director told me that a whole 6 production lines from a factory 200km off where down, and that I needed to resolve some firewall issue. I went to a shitty compaq desktop labelled 'firewall' with no screen and kind of guessed the password (based on the default IT password I knew from reformatting computers), it booted, and the guy on the line seemed happy. I've never felt so close to getting fired and this was my first job ever. Mystery boxes like this should be banned.

I ran into one of these at a sears store not that many years ago. Was running Novell or something on a big coax token-ring network of some kind. This was decades into tcp/ip and the internet. It was running a pentium pro badge, so I assume it was ancient networking tech even when it was spun up, probably as a replacement for a dead netware server.

It was still running their tire shop.

I carefully closed the door and closed the ticket as “won’t do”. No way I was shutting that off to install a new UPS rack lol.

It is almost certainly doing something important like running the checkout database.

You can also look at the librarian and checkout machines for clues. Netstat one of those and you’ll probably see persistent outbound connections to your mystery server.

If that’s not a viable path for some reason (such as you’re not actually allowed to be doing this) It probably has a static IP. Find the dhcp server, check the range. It’s probably avoiding high numbers in the cidr so handing out 192.168.0.2-99 the server is probably some easy to remember address like 100 or 200. (Some sysadmins avoid low numbers and put servers at 2-10 so checking the range is a must) you can probably infer it from the dhcp address you get when you join, (probably somewhere in the 20s or 60s) some idiots put their gateway at the last address and count down (looking at you Comcast) but that was less common ten and twenty years ago.

If you’re going full black box I’d scan the whole range and find addresses that look like servers and once identified port scan them for listening services. Look for standard ports like dbs (is this a windows shop? Is it an access database?) also look for web servers and webserver alt ports like 8080

Maybe an old ILS system that they never fully decommissioned. About 21 years ago, I was working at a local library that had Dynix running on an AS/400-series (I think) that was a tank and never went down. We regretfully migrated to Sirsi which was a web-based piece of shit. We had the old system running along side it for a while (minus all the terminals, which sadly we all tore out) to run some last year reports and access data that couldn’t be converted over. The former IT director who was the Dynix guy was replaced by a new person who didn’t know anything about it. I could see that happening where people eventually forgot about that dusty old unimportant box in the back corner.

I remember a friend in college telling me a story like this once: some walled off room with wires running in it was opened up and they found an old sever running behind it. No idea what it was doing. This was in 2001.

I'm pretty sure it's doing nothing. It doesn't have a monitor so presumably it has a network cable?

It's decades old, so it's a file server? Let's say it's circa 2000, that means it has tiny hard drives that have been spinning for 25 years. And probably a 10mb network connection? With a 25 year old OS?

Sure. Maybe its running Linux from 2001, and the OS is still alive. But without any attention thr disk is long since full of log files. Early 2000s, means this has a few megs (not gigs) of ram, probably less than a couple gigs of disk space, a pentium cpu.

I know it's possible for a machine to be useful and unattended for decades. But in a local library? Frankly I'd just pull the plug.

What's an "old monitor with a serial connection?"