A few years ago I and a few friends found a pile of old PCI Express Fibre Channel cards from some manufacturer I can no longer remember. 2.5 gigabits per second

A few years ago I and a few friends found a pile of old PCI Express Fibre Channel cards from some manufacturer I can no longer remember. 2.5 gigabits per second being faster than one and people being on an undergrad budget, we soon started wondering whether they could be repurposed as network interface cards in our ad hoc server colo built in an old abandoned storage room, which didn't even exist in the original dorm floor plans. A bit of googling turned out that it was possible and supported by the manufacturer - if you ran Linux 2.6 and were prepared to compile the kernel drivers yourself. We quickly ditched the project when we found out that the old driver made newer kernels panic and setting up link aggregation on normal gigabit ethernet cards wasn't that much of a hassle anyway.