After the success of the first rescue from the eWaste pile, I grabbed a second.
I brought it home safe and sound
I also grabbed a bag of cotton balls from CVS for free with a $4-off coupon, so that will be nice to use with isopropyl alchohol.
Anyway, it made it home, joining the growing stack of optiplexes
This one was FAR cleaner than the first one, which was nice
Still, that's one dusty PSU
Unfortunately, it detected an issue in POST, and threw an error.
I opened the case to see that the motherboard fan was spinning just fine. Maybe the fan is just failing to report the RPM to the motherboard, but it's spinning fine. To check if this was the case, I swapped the chassis fan and the CPU can, but the error persisted... ugh. Looks like that means that it's a motherboard issue and not a fan issue. I can hit esc to skip the checks, but I need to do that every time it boots, and that's just not feasible for a server.
Well, this one I'd consider the first failure. Fixing this would be beyond my skill level. I tried a BIOS update, but that didn't help so it looks hardware-related. Hopefully I get better luck on the next one.