When I finally get to ROI, I will let you know. It's looking at about 6 months on this unit.
I should also note that this is co-located at a very high end, well cooled datacenter.
The performance of this machine is at max capacity.
I wonder if I have someone mining on my machine besides me. But I may never really know, since I don't have root.
Is there by chance another OS that I could use for this machine?
You have a point. Without root access you have no way to tell what it is really doing. For all you know these could be part of the chinese military hacking network. What a brilliant method to get around blocking IP ranges from specific countries. Not to sound like a tinfoil hat. I'm just saying, you have no idea.