Slashdot Mirror
Has Anyone Played With Gateway Micro Server?
alexhmit01 asks: "So my friend's father bought a new set of machines for his office from Gateway, and they included with it this little cube called a Micro Server, which he gave to his son. Naturally, the first thing that we did was crack it open, and saw that it includes a PCI slot (some expandability, currently has a modem that we'll yank), and 10 GB hard drive. We're flipping through the manual, assuming that it is an NT machine when I notice they talk about SMB shares, so I'm assuming SAMBA. I get to the back and see two documents, the BSD license and the GPL. We check out the specs, it runs a 64-bit RISC processor (I'm assuming Arm), and Linux 2.0! So how many IT people have gotten one of these and decided to actually put it to use? Any suggestions? "
"They include some easy-to-use utilities, which is nice as someone else can administer the thing when we're done setting it up.
Now, their firewall support, etc., is lacking (as it is Linux 2.0) compared to the stuff that Linux 2.2 supports, but I don't want to give up the flexibility of their tools.
Has anyone done much work on one of these? We're planning to stick on sshd and hack around with it (after imaging the drive) and I was wondering what others have done with this device. It seems like a great piece of hardware, it's tiny... it's adorable."
It would be nice to get more stats on these. Do they come with a network card? What kind of video do they support? What processor options are there?
Found this on Gateway's website, looks like the beast we're talking about here.
Gateway Micro Server 100
The ARM arch doesn't have a 64-bit variant, so whatever chip is in there, it ain't ARM-based. 64-bit embedded RISC processor probably means MIPS, but not necessarily...
Once again, Slashdot doesn't read Slashdot.
How about:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/ 10/13/132216.shtml
or even
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/ 12/08/136255.shtml
Where Hemos acknowledges that slashdot doesn't read slashdot on this very topic.
As for this story:
It's MIPS, not ARM, yes, it is Samba, and yes, it's self-hosting.
Oh, and it is Apache, and Cobalt did a pretty nice job with the web management.
They work great for their intended purpose, but get a little wonky if you try to do things that the web-gui can't do.
But you can always give up and put NetBSD on it.
-Zandr
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
People probably ignore the secondary costs of operating a largish data-centre. Afterall, when buying a car, is all you look at only the peak RPM of the 'Motor Inside (TM)'. I would be interested to see whether anyone could post some rough figures for cost per square metre for hosting a bunch of racks. You've got uninterruptable power supplies (min 300-500K upfront capital costs), air-conditioning (we're talking heavy duty water coolers), Occupational Health and Safety issues (imagine 2000 fans going at once), physical security, etc. The question I suppose is does the savings in form factor (low heat dissipation, with resuling savings in fan) give a better value-for money for your targetted system load? If you've got only a few big dynamic databases and lotsa static pages you can probably get away with a combination of several CacheRaqs and say an Origin 200 for fast parallel RAID I/O. The mix of machines might give better overall mean time between failures at accetpable cost. Also keep in mind that your techies won't be too happy at getting up at 4am in the morning to fix problems. A reasonable degree of redundancy is useful.
... the sunk cost is in the infrastructure but the value is in the services.
What I see happening is that we are getting past the analogous stage where electricity generators are a novelty and we are shifting into decent web-engineering, much as the early layout of the electric grid standardised (or commodidised) transformers, generators, motors etc. You will probably see similar moves in the computer industry as the infrastructure goes invisible. You won't be buying a computer but a URL with guarenteed x Gigabytes storage accessible anywhere in the world at a predetermined level of service/performance. Slide-in storage modules (like for portables) for CD/DVD/HD/etc will become the norm and if the hardware vendors stop squabbling among themselves for specification control of the bus and I/O plugs, something similar for processors. Take a look at Sony's iLink (aka Apple Firewire). The reason why consumer electronics is the key is that the mass scales of economies will swamp anything a dedicated system will produce except in niche areas. People forget that it's the software/services that people are willing to pay for. Stability and service becomes a more important factor once a certain level of features is in place. If the Cobalt team can offer a decent price-competitive solution below the kink in the cost curve (the point where the plant pays for itself and thus competes with other paid-off fabs) where the marginal costs are so much smaller, then good luck to them.
Repeat after me
LL
 All I can say is that Cobalt must be raking it in hand-over-fist. Their "newest" design is the Raq III, which ran on a 300 mHz AMD processor last time I checked. Of course, they're targetting non-processor-intensive jobs, so it can swing, but, without the cute boxes and web interface, these would be $400 machines.
Oh well, I hear they're quite cute and functional, so enjoy the toy!
--JRZ
They cost Aust $2999 Performance was fairly low, topping out at 260,000 bytes per second of throughput.
here is part of the article..
The Gateway server is easily the cutest of the servers. A little black box not much bigger than a tissue box, it sits and grins at you with its single huge green LED across the front.
As far as specifications go, the Gateway was very different to the other servers tested in that it had a dedicated RISC processor, and no option of a keyboard/mouse/monitor for installation. To set the machine up, you plug it in, program the network details (IP Address, Subnet Mask, Gateway Etc from a small 6 button control panel with a 2 line segmented LCD mounted on the back of the unit. From here, all the setup can be done via a nice friendly web interface or CD Setup Wizard.
One of the things we noted was the slow boot time of this machine. If the machine is not shut down properly, it takes an inordinate amount of time to check the disk on restart.
Transfer of data to the server can be done using FTP, SMB (Windows file sharing) and Appletalk. Finding the root of the web server involved a little poking around though the web interface, but once found, we were able to FTP the files with little trouble. The FTP transfer was a little slower than the other machines, which led us to believe that the gateway was not in the same league as its competitors in the raw speed stakes.
In the static tests, we confirmed that the lack of RAM and slower hard disk of the Gateway made it struggle as far as performance is concerned. In fact, during the test, I received the following e-mail from the unit:
There are several other monitoring features built in including a user disk space monitor that tells you when disk space is running short for a particular user.
The Gateway has a backup facility built in, though we did not test it. There is no redundancy of disk drives or power supplies so the server will need to be removed from service to have these parts replaced or upgraded. There is very little about the Gateway that can be upgraded, you could upgrade to more disk space and add more RAM but the CPU is a RISC chip, and is not in a socket. There are 2 10/100 Ethernet ports and a modem, allowing you to set this server up as a small office router with dialup Internet Access.
A 5 port DSS-5+ Dlink Fast Ethernet Switch is included in the package. The micro server will run as a small departmental File Server with quotas, a DHCP Server, and an e-mail server.
Other features of note are:
Packet Filtering (Firewall), Web & DNS Caching, Private discussion Groups, Web based HTML creation and FrontPage Extensions.
A simple to use Setup Card and CD Setup Wizard (Win 32 only) was included, although not tested. Mark
Mark RMIT IT Test Lab Engineer http://www.geekzone.com.au/~msnell
I've got a Gateway MicroServer 100 at the office - and to date, I still can't tell you if it's a mistake or not.
For inital setup, it's pretty friggin' non-technical. There's a 2 line LCD screen on the back - put in the IP, and go. It's now online, and ready to be administered via a web browser. Set up your users, and your groups, and you are ready to go.
But, there's some downsides. Horsepower on it seems pretty good - the network at the office is a homogenous environment of Win9x, NT, 2000, and Linux clients and boxen. For a quick setup for a nontechnical person, it's perfect. However, if you want to get under the hood - that a bit uglier. For those who don't know, this is a "server appliance" so there's no local logins - no keyboard or screen for that, just a two line LCD screen that shows it's status at boot time.
Apache comes pre-configured, along with SAMBA, and a couple other goodies (email, etc.) However, nothing advanced like MySQL, etc. Telnet is disabled (not nessisarily a bad thing), and the box has a maintance mode that enables telnet for an hour. Otherwise, the only way to play with it is the web-based administration - which happens to be quite inadequate for my tastes. Setting up users is easy, but, it's not very robust, and sometimes the server gets paranoid for no reason - SAMBA will drop them, and won't let them back in with out tricking it.
It's got it's own system for getting updates from GW2k, but, I've yet to see a package of updates.
If you want a real server, this isn't it. If you want a quick to install system for small-time file sharing, with very little setup, this is it. It's great for sending out to a site with non-tech people in it. For me - well, I'm not so fond of it in many ways. Lack of power for administration, somewhat slow SAMBA responsiveness at times, sometimes it has user rights issues (oh, and SERIOUS problems with the user / group quota idea - it doesn't seem to take me seriously quite often), and it's designed to be a 'hands off' type of toy. All of those things together make it not so hot of a toy.
And as much as it will sound like flame bait - I still prefer my old diehard, no-reboots except hardware failure, dual PPro NT 4.0 server to this thing. Of course, I'd prefer a REALLY well configured Linux boxen to my NT server - and the Cobalt Qube2... er... Gateway MicroServer 100 doen't count at all.
(And for the record - the fact that the box is there is my own stinkin' fault. I wanted something that would be dead simple for someone else to admin while I was away on trips... I'm not sure what I SHOULD have choosen instead.)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org