Comment Re:Yes (Score 2) 467
You really cannot trust such devices in production environment and repurposing for testing would fail because you might run into issues installing current software on that hardware as it's not officially supported.
Don't test with obsolete hardware.
If your plan was to run linux on them, why did you bother with BMC updates, just leave it unconfigured. Yes, it'll flash ugly orange error messages, but you know those are unneccessary and you'll remote manage the machine over ssh anyways.
Call Dell, explain them that you need new servers and you'd like to recycle your old ones.
They'll likely even give you some discount for the old machines rather than charge you for recycling them.
You get new hardware to work with, which is under warranty again, and it's most likely less power consuming and produces less heat so you'll save on the energy bill and cooling as well.
This is assuming you are the first owner of the devices though. If you bought them second hand, you're SOL.