Do it Yourself 1U Half-Width Server

Erasei writes "After talking about making my own rack mount case, a friend of mine sent me this link of a 1U Halfwidth rack-mount server. Complete with its own LCD display and Compact Flash slot, its one sweet little server for the price, near nothing." This is really impressive work. A box like that could be a great little inexpensive MP3 server or something. Very cool.

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Taco has found the 1256th thing he thinks would make a good MP3 device.

Re:Wow

[angel]

Actually it wouldn't make a good mp3 player. It is next to impossible to play mp3's on a 486 and instead of a hard drive they are using flash so you can fit like 10 songs maybe? Sounds like a fairly cool project but not worth doing the way they did. If you put in a bit of NEW hardware it might be cool. Sorry but anyone can put a 486 in a small box.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The best is an mp3 cd player either the Rio Volt at $169 or the soon to be release April 1st the TDK MOJO at $179
For those wanting an EASY ...did I SAY easy..any dimwit idiot could install on an old Pentium and make an mp3 streamer server check out e-smith mp3 jukebox. You need P90 or above, 32MB, good size harddrive if your BIOS supports over 8GB go for it, and a network card. You don't need a mouse, and only need a monitor and keyboard when initially installing it. From there on it's webbased managed and to stream your mp3z it's webbased.

Re:Wow

[Geek In Training]

Read the parent... it is actually pretty useful.

I'm really surprised at all the good AC posts I'm seeing lately; why don't you people just register and login?

And moderators, why aren't you setting your threshold at -1, or at least 0??

*sigh* I guess I'm turning into Offtopic now, sorry.

Re:Wow

[captmudd]

uhm, hm. ibm microdrive = 1gig.

Re:Wow

[rgmoore]

Yeah, but you pay $400+ for that 1GB microdrive. By the time you've shelled out that, you might as well buy a cheap PC instead. You could probably salvage a Pentium class PC for $100 and add a 40 GB harddrive for less than $200. Microdrives are cool, but they're not exactly the thing to get when you're trying to go for "build it in your garage for the price of labor" type projects.

Re:Wow

[clare-ents]

"Actually it wouldn't make a good mp3 player. It is next to impossible to play mp3's on a 486 and instead of a hard drive they are using flash so you can fit like 10 songs maybe? Sounds like a fairly cool project but not worth doing the way they did. If you put in a bit of NEW hardware it might be cool. Sorry but anyone can put a 486 in a small box."

It should make a fairly good MP3 player :

It's got no fans so the room noise will be quiet,
It has ethernet so all the songs can live on a noisey server a long way away. It's probably just about fast enough to decode in real time. It will display the tracknames quite nicely on the front panel display.

Re:Wow

[TheStruuus]

anyone know how to configure slakware to run from a serial port? I want to build one.. but i doubt i could set ip up alone

old pizza boxes

[hex1848]

finally, a use for my roommates ever growing pile of empty dominos boxes. now all i need is a bunch of anti RIAA stickers and ill be set.

I should recommend this to a friend of mine...

[ca1v1n]

...who is on track to having a full rack in his dorm room. I'm sure his roommate would appreciate it.

In all seriousness, this is good stuff. Smaller and cheaper is hard to beat.

Re:I should recommend this to a friend of mine...

[PD]

I had a full rack in my dorm room, but then she went home.

ba DUM dum

More room for beer.

[_14k4]

Sweet. It'd leave more room for the fridge in my lan party box. And the speakers. And super-models wearing linux t's. Mmm... beer.

You thought I'd say "Mmmm super models" huh? Well, I just did!

rapid slashdot

[Stephen Samuel]

First post wasn't even up, and it was already slashdotted.
--

/.ed

[CrimsonHat]

My opinion is that if their site can get /.ed so easily, I don't want to buy a server from them.

Re:/.ed

[BMazurek]

I don't know about that. Maybe they're just running Windows....

Re:/.ed

[Pinball Wizard]

C'mon, its a freakin 486, and the site is running on it. Of course its slashdotted. Think firewall or DNS/DHCP server, possibly a static web page server for an intranet.

Re:/.ed

[Ace905]

"My opinion is that if their site can get /.ed so easily, I don't want to buy a server from them."

You might be on to something there, on the other hand they may have pre-determined their bandwidth by the fact that they are hosted on a free-provider.

Generally prodigy engineering students are flat broke.

Re:/.ed

[cymen]

For those of us who don't speak French - does free this "free-provider" actually give away colocation spots? Sounds kinda interesting...

Google Cache

[Segfault 11]

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://1u.hom eip.net/

Yeah, cry "karma whore" all you fucking want to...

Re:Google Cache

[Evil Adrian]

Umm... what's a karma whore?
---
evil adrian

Re:Google Cache

[ScuzzMonkey]

You're too young, kid. Maybe in a few years.

Crusoe and Heat consumption

[sabre]

A while back there was mention of using Transmeta's Crusoe processor for server applications like this... It would seem to be a very good solution, because once you start packing servers together this closely, heat and powerconsumption (California redux? :) becomes a major major issue.

Has anyone else heard anything more about this, or has Transmeta stopped pushing this? Wouldn't it be nice to have a 4 way transmeta in a half U space? :)

-Chris

Re:Crusoe and Heat consumption

[alprazolam]

speaking of power consumption regulating down to 3 from five volts isn't power efficient, why do you need 5 volts?

Re:Crusoe and Heat consumption

[bad-badtz-maru]

Typical TTL circuits operate at 5 volts.

maru

Re:Crusoe and Heat consumption

[artg]

5v may be all you need, though : although a PC supplies +-12, +-5, most of those supplies are used only for cards, not the motherboard.

I've got a P55TV2 that's going to be used for an MP3 player. The motherboard will run happily with only 5V connected: I need 12V to run a video board, but that won't be in the final kit.

Unfortunately, the sound card also wants +-12 - but I could use USB sound, or I could use a tiny DC-DC converter to provide it for both sound and RS232. A 2 1/2" disc runs from 5V only. No need for a floppy, and the low-profile PCI ethernet card seems to use 5v too.

./ already

[runestar]

Damn that didn't take long. I really think as a service Slashdot should mirror webpages of the most recent articles.

Anyway does this thing look anygood? or is it still Vaporware?

Runestar

Re:./ already

[_14k4]

How often do things get dot slashed? :)

Re:./ already

[pohl]

Whenever they're in my current working directory and not in $PATH?

Re:./ already

[davidu]

...about as often as I get sloshed. ;-)

college is chaos man.
-Davidu

Re:./ already

[Leto2]

Just as many times as equal losers try to start a program in the current dir by typing
# /.foo

Re:./ already

[chrysrobyn]

They must be talking about a file in the current directory and not a hidden entry in the root.

Re:./ already

[SquadBoy]

I have tried to find and start foo I even did a
apt-get install foo
and it could not find the package. Where is foo and how do you get it and what does it do?
:)

Re:./ already

[Leto2]

it's in the ports tree.

Cached page on google

[trenton]

Thanks to google for providing a cached version of the page. Sorry, no images, but the content is good. (Wouldn't it be great if google cached images, too?)

Re:Cached page on google

[samason]

Not sure if anybody's noticed but. . . The google cache is off a diffrent web site, its content is similar looks like a more recent version (more content).

It is however, up at the moment, not sure if it will survive a slashdot attack but . . . here it is:

http://wtarreau.free.fr/1u/

Slashdot effect

[stud9920]

If you can't reach the server because of the /.-effect, here is one link

Journalistic Integrity

[LaNMaN2000]

At least nobody can criticize /.'s relationship with VA Linux after this post. I priced servers a while back and VA's 1U rack mounts are very overprices. They must have at least a 25%-50% margin on every unit sold. It's refreshing to see the /. editors post a useful link/story even though it may hurt VA's bottom line.

Lenny

Re:Journalistic Integrity

[SgtAaron]

They must have at least a 25%-50% margin on every unit sold. It's refreshing to see the /. editors post a useful link/story even though it may hurt VA's bottom line.

We purchased a VA linux 2U server awhile back. Opened the thing up after we got it and wondered what all the money was for :-) Well, it was a 2U, even, and we purchased the 1U units from Penguin Computing, because of what you found: the 1U's seemed quite expensive. The VA box has been a stable platform, I must say.

The fact is, I wanted to by from VA and Penguin as a measure of support for Linux-aware companies. Probably could have gotten the things much cheaper elsewhere, but this was the first time I was made to worry about real technical support.

But I digress! As far as these half-sized 1U units go, I'd love them if they had some horsepower. That's what I need more and more these days, lots of RAM, mucho I/O throughput, and major CPU horsepower. So, I'd have to say "no" if they aren't (and the site is slashdotted, but I read in another post that they were 486-class).

Re:Journalistic Integrity

[ca1v1n]

Ummm... I don't think VA's customers are interested in running a 486-120 with 16MB RAM and a compactflash card for a hard drive. This is simply Slashdot doing what it does best: linking to cool things on hopelessly underpowered servers.

Re:Journalistic Integrity

[johnnyb]

I wouldn't call anything VA did "overpriced". Their servers are worth every penny. The fact that they have a high margin is great for me, because it gives them more money to test equiptment before they ship it to me. They even use Teflon cables for internal SCSI cabling. That's an extra $150 just to be extra sure that you don't have SCSI problems. VA machines are wonderful.

Re:Journalistic Integrity

[Caball]

<>

Huh? You think that someone who was considering a server from VD Linux is going to build one of these shit boxes instead? I am certain the load handling will be comparable, right?

PLEASE!

Re:Journalistic Integrity

[epicurus]

they must be slipping...

Re:Journalistic Integrity

[DEATH AND HATRED]

I use to work for VA Linux, and you do NOT want to buy their products. Half of them ship DOA, they dont honor the service agreements, its amazing that place is still in business. I remember one meeting where they told us they had shipped several hundred servers out that were DOA. Were they going to tell the customers? No, let them call in, and act like its just a normal DOA box. Overpriced crap is what they sell. They should sell hardware for microsoft, its that bad. Worse than packard bell.

damn..

[austad]

It's already slashdotted. I hope the site wasn't demonstrating the awesome power of the 1u half-width server by running on one...

Re:damn..

[rc-flyer]

Actually, it is, according to the Google cached page.

Re:damn..

[davidu]

Yes, this server was running their tiny little box.
-Davidu

Re:damn..

[rograndom]

well it *is* a 486-100. Isn't that about the same as that webserver that was being run by a potato?

Re:damn..

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Yes he was.

But I'd be more concerned with slashdotting his ISP connection than the box itself.

Cute, but not practical

[Jailbrekr]

Ya, its 1.75inches high, and yes, it is only half the width of a rack. But c'mon. A 486? You can get an SBC (Single Board Computers) that are credit card sized (as previous /. articles have pointed out). Having 84 of these in a full sized rack would prolly be the equivilant of 2-3 dual PIII/800 rack servers......

Sure, this is cheap, but only if your time is worth little. Yes, it has geek value, but Geek value is becoming harder to obtain, as most of this has already been done..............

Damn, need more coffee.

Re:Cute, but not practical

[boing boing]

Is is really all that cheap, a Compact Flash card costs ~$30, add a PCMCIA adaptor and the spare parts. I'm not impressed

Re:Cute, but not practical

[Eck]

It's good for inspiration purposes, at least.

No reason we can't go out and do the same thing with a faster system board. Using a cooler, lower power CPU makes sense, of course (can you get Crusoe boards for a reasonable price?). I'd like to know how easy it would be to make a network activity LED for the front panel. Time to break out the tools and put that old 19" enclosure in the basement to some use!

Re:Cute, but not practical

[bladel]

Absolutely. There's really no commercial value here, but it would suffice for routing a small home network or serving games at LAN parties.

{shameless plug}
My company builds powerful (SMP) high-density servers that sport all of these features and more.
{/shameless plug}

Um... Why?

[Chelloveck]

Let me be the first to ask... Why? Why would anyone really want to build enough of these to make it worthwhile? I mean, it's a neat hack and is worth something just for that. But beyond the hack value, who's really going to spend time to make 84 of these things to fill a 42U rack?

And I really have a problem with the phrases "reliable" and "built from salvaged parts" used in the same sentence. Okay, reliable enough for a home system, sure. I have plenty of my own Frankenstein machines. But would you really trust your business to something salvaged and hacked together like this?

Though I suppose it would make a nifty SETI@Home frame...

Chelloveck

Flash RAM != reliable

[ebh]

In a rack, hard disks shouldn't be "fragile". OTOH, flash memory wears out after some number of thousands of writes. So much for /tmp...

Re:Flash RAM != reliable

[WasterDave]

Correct. So you mount / as read only on the flash disk, and put /tmp in a memory disk. AND TURN OFF SWAPPING!!

Dave

Re:Flash RAM != reliable

[WasterDave]

Yes and no. I don't have the EEPROM blowing/erasing gear, most motherboards can't mount an EEPROM as a disk (IIRC). And using IDE flash is just so simple.

So, yeah, I get done out of $40.

Dave

Re:Flash RAM != reliable

[shepd]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't EEPROMs have to be burned (in this case, written) from start to finish?

That makes maintenance difficult (and, at SysAdmin prices, that means more than $40 of time [maybe]). With flash I'd assume you can just remount it read-write and fix your problem right away.

But perhaps I'm wrong...

Wow, only 32 comments and it's slashdotted already

[Bob Dobbz]

You guys are sure quick on the trigger.
I didn't even have a chance to look at it!

Expensive

[anon757]

I was going to build one once, but i found the most expensive part was an LCD screen (not one of those crappy 2 line lcd displays). That, and very few companies actually sell empty 1U cases.

Re:Expensive

[bluGill]

Well, they made their own case. Saved a bundle of money. Rack mound cases are horridly expensive. They did use one of those 2 line lcd displays (or maybe 4 lines, not much whatever).

Re:Expensive

[mincus]

"I can eat worms! I can eat worms!!!" - Kimmi

i didnt watch it, but someone told me about it. Thats such BS. if shes a friggin vegetarian, she shouldnt be eating worms. ah well.

.mincus

on a related note:

[pohl]

Are there any more modestly-sized racks for rackmount hardware? The only things I've managed to find are huge, ceiling-to-floor things that cost at least a grand. Are there no smaller ones for someone who might want at most 6Us or so?

Re:on a related note:

[Swift Kick]

Yes. Go to a music gear store, like Sam Ash or Guitar Center. You will find a number of racks in many different sizes and shapes. They're fairly common since a lot of gear happens to be rackmountable (i.e. synths, effect processors, etc). They're not that expensive either. You may even find decent prices on online stores.

Re:on a related note:

[bluGill]

Sure. open racks are fairly cheap, and small racks exist. Look for musicians, a lot of their better equipment is rack mount and they generally don't have money when first starting out so they are likely to know the tricks.

Alternitively, there isn't much to a rack. With a drill and some bolts you can make your own. Angle iron from the side rails and drill holes where you need them. These can be nice if you are creative enough.

Re:on a related note:

[JohnTheFisherman]

One cheap source would be a music store, like Rondo Music. I've never dealt with them, but they have cheap portable racks that should do very well for what you're likely to use as a 'fixed' installation. Also someone like Musician's Friend would work. Stick to a music store or an electronics surplus place - they're the same 19" racks, and most music-oriented ones will be better built and much, much cheaper. They'll usually be black plastic or wood covered in black carpeting.

You could also check out Mouser, Digikey, Allied, or Newark for some open racks. A bit pricey, though, and not nearly as sturdy. The closed cabinet racks are horrifically priced.

Re:on a related note:

[bflame]

Take a look at MilesTek they have a large selection of rack mounted stuff. I don't know if they carry cases but they have a large amount of other stuff.

Re:on a related note:

[adolf]

Drilled and tapped rack rails are available from Parts Express, in Dayton, OH. Rails and all other specialized hardware required to build any manner of rack (from small road case, to floor-to-ceiling bolt-in varieties) can be found at TCH.

I've purchased from each, with good results. Though, for a small, portable rack, nothing beats the price of SKB's offerings.

As far as tricks go, it's fairly simple: used racks from a pawn shop; used racks from the local guitar store; used racks from Ebay (in that order).

Needed: cheap rackmount cases

[n8ur]

I was hoping this would be about a commercially available rackmount chassis for a reasonable price. That's what the world really needs.

No wonder it's /.'ed

[ca1v1n]

It's running on a dynamic DNS service, implying a modem or low-end DSL link. Add to that that it's on a 486 with 16 MB RAM, and you can imagine it's having trouble keeping up. This is almost as bad as the time /. linked to the Atari webserver.

Re:Wow, only 32 comments and it's slashdotted alre

[perlyking]

What level of hits constitute being slashdotted?
How much does it take to make a server go down? I ask out of genuine interest, I'm scared to even mention one of my sites in a comment :-)

Cheap date ...

[Foxman98]

I think those people over at http://unixsex.com/ must be getting pretty hot and bothered at the prospect of such a cheap date.....

Re:Cheap date ...

[Foxman98]

Here's a clickable Link for those too lazy to cut and paste. I can imagine the pictures now, "She was feeling very damp at the prospect of a full rack of those monsters..."

Automatic Mirroring

[zesnark]

Could someone out there with a lot of bandwidth write a script that would crawl /. articles for links and wget them to a fast mirror? Maybe even /. itself could do this?

z

get back to work :)

[CoreDump]

Speaking as Erasei's boss, I think he should really be getting back to work and not spending his time submitting stories to slashdot!

( Just kidding, btw )
-Erasei's Boss

P.S. Please disregard the photos on his website. I submit to being under the influence of Redbull at the time and claim temporary insanity.

------------------------------------------------ ------------

Cool...

[smoondog]

I figured this could be done. I have a cobalt appliance (Raqx) and there is almost nothing inside. I hope they have the appropriate mounting brackets to fix two together (can't check link its /.'ed)

-Moondog

mirror

[tedtimmons]

Here's my mirror, on a relatively high-availability server: http://www.perljam.net/misc/1u/wtarreau.free.fr/1u / I don't have the additional images- deal with it. -ted

Vertical 2u Packaging

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux NetworX has a vertical rack mount server - check it out at http://www.linuxnetworx.com/products/evolocity1.ht ml It runs about 12 degrees cooler than average 2U servers. I can only imaging how much cooler it runs than a 1U half server.

/. effect is bad for friendship

[Hanno]

a friend of mine sent me this link of a 1U Halfwidth rack-mount server

Now that the server is slashdotted, is he still your friend?

------------------

Re:get back to work :)

[GoofyBoy]

heh heh :)

http://erasei.com/images/chris_drugged.jpg

I like this quote..

[berry2k]

"Most recent 486-based motherboards will accept 4 SIMMs." Recent 486-based motherboards? Yeah, with the money I save building this machine I can go get one of those "new" Atari 2600's.....

Nice Server

[rppp01]

Having had the wonderful opportunity to view this wonderful hack hosted on that wonderful hack, I must say that I may or may not ever actually get to see the damn thing!

Re:Another moderator chooses crack!

[mikael_j]

I think it's the user (anoMymous coward) who has bad karma...

/Mikael Jacobson

"But surely we won't be still stuck with Linux in 25 years!?"

I beg to differ...

[Cheerio Boy]

It is next to impossible to play mp3's on a 486 and instead of a hard drive they are using flash so you can fit like 10 songs maybe?

I currently have a 486 laptop with 20meg of RAM running Debian 2.2r2. It plays .mp3 files with a recompiled mpg123 under X just fine.

Now I will grant you the hard drive issue. You need some kind of large media for storing .mp3 files. However a 486 will play them just fine as long as you have very little overhead.



The Tick - "Spoon!"

NEO - "There is no spoon."

Re:I beg to differ...

[Lord Kestrel]

If you don't want overhead, don't run X. Even if it isn't using much cpu time, it's still using ram. While you do have 20 megs, loading and caching mp3s would probably be faster with more of that ram availiable to mpg123.

just my .02..


---GEEK CODE---
Ver: 3.12
GCS/S d- s++: a-- C++++ UBCL+++ P+ L++
W+++ PS+ Y+ R+ b+++ h+(++) r++ y+

Re:I beg to differ...

[Cheerio Boy]

I understand that but thanks for mentioning it.

The X note was to show that it works even with overhead.

Hell, I had one friend tell me he was running NetBSD with mpg123 on a 486sx with 16meg of ram. I didn't believe it until I heard it play!


The Tick - "Spoon!"

NEO - "There is no spoon."

Re:I beg to differ...

[Lord Kestrel]

Do you know if it compiles on a 386? I've got my old 386sx-25 in a compact AT mobo, and I've thought about trying to fire it up one of these days. Might be as cool as getting netbsd to run on my dreamcast :)


---GEEK CODE---
Ver: 3.12
GCS/S d- s++: a-- C++++ UBCL+++ P+ L++
W+++ PS+ Y+ R+ b+++ h+(++) r++ y+

Re:I beg to differ...

[Cheerio Boy]

I've never tried on a 386 but the compile options don't support it as far as I know. You can try it but you're on your own. ;-)



The Tick - "Spoon!"

NEO - "There is no spoon."

Re:I beg to differ...

[Cheerio Boy]

The 486 I'm running on is a DX4-100 but I've heard it run on an SX-33. YMMV. ;-)



The Tick - "Spoon!"

NEO - "There is no spoon."

Re:I beg to differ...

[ContraB]

I currently have a 486 laptop with 20meg of RAM running Debian 2.2r2. It plays .mp3 files with a recompiled mpg123 under X just fine.

Now I will grant you the hard drive issue. You need some kind of large media for storing .mp3 files. However a 486 will play them just fine as long as you have very little overhead.

I'm very impressed that you got a 486 to play back an MP3... what did you do differently to compile mpg123 that it plays on your system? I had a 486/66 DX2 with 24MB RAM, and MPG123 just couldn't do it, not even in just console mode. It "skipped" horribly just playing back only one channel. This is with RH 6.2.

I say "had" because I then got an 83MHz Pentium Overdrive processor for it through eBay. Now it works better, but the CPU utilization is around 60%. So again I ask, what optimizations did you recompile MPG123 with? Thanks for any insight...

I'm actually also going the Compact Flash boot route. I solved the "cFlash is too small for MP3" problem by burning MP3 CDs for it. Works pretty well so far. I'm about 1/2 done with the project.

--Thad

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Re:I beg to differ...

[Dfiant]

Yeah, I couldn't get a 486 DX2/66 to work, either. I had to downsample or else it'd skip, even when I overclocked it to 83 MHz. =)

Re:I beg to differ...

[Cheerio Boy]

I'm very impressed that you got a 486 to play back an MP3... what did you do differently to compile mpg123 that it plays on your system? I had a 486/66 DX2 with 24MB RAM, and MPG123 just couldn't do it, not even in just console mode. It "skipped" horribly just playing back only one channel. This is with RH 6.2.

Actually there's a make option for it: make linux-i486 which optomizes the code for 486 only.

I'm using Debian 2.2r2 with mpg123-0.59r but the option should work for any version of linux. Like I said - mine works even under X. Now granted when you do _anything_ but play .mp3's with it there is some skip but if you're using a 486 to play .mp3's then you shouldn't be using it for anything else at the time. ;-)


The Tick - "Spoon!"

NEO - "There is no spoon."

Re:I beg to differ...

[Girf]

To compile mpg123 you download the sources, tar -xzvf them and them make install them.

Seriously though, the RPM of mpg123 is compiled to work on any machine, not your's. I had the same problems as you running on a P75, recompiled mpg123 and it works great. (Only takes about 20% of my CPU time).

homeip.net domains

[SCHecklerX]

You guys do know that people who use those domains are typically (like me) people hosting their own sites over cablemodem, isdn, or even worse, dialup.

Please think before wiping out some poor schmuck's personal web site. My own site (also using dyndns) is also responsible for mailing lists for a local group of athletes, and I'd hate to see what would happen if I were to get slashdotted (uh oh...I shouldn't have said that, should I?)

Google /.ed also ???

[jamner]

It would appear that Google as recieved some /.age at their cache site.

Now that's some seriuos /. or maybe the cache is on a different server setup. ??

Re:Google /.ed also ???

[CodeMunch]

Nope. comes up fine me.

--Clay

Re:Google /.ed also ???

[mistered]

It depends on your browser: my Communicator 4.73 waits for the images to load before rendering the page. Google doesn't cache the images, so nothing happens until I hit "stop," and then the page renders.

IE 4.0 renders as it goes, so it displays the whole page but continues trying to load the images until I hit "stop."

Also a friendly reminder, use those width= and height= tags on your images, thanks!

Suggestion For a Sweet 1U Server

[TheHulk]

Supermicro makes some very solid 1U servers. I've used them for all types of purposes from VPN servers to Apache servers. Extremely reasonable price of $1100 for the base model. Additionaly, since most necessary components are already built into the motherboard (i.e. NIC, SCSI, Video) just throw in a harddrive, processor and memory and your rocking. Also, since they're dual processor capable and take up to 4GB of RAM, they can make very powerful application servers IMHO. Hope this helps.

Not that much of an innovation, though

[rxmd]

Is it just me or is there no real innovation in this piece of hardware?

All it says is "Get yourself a server in whatever shape you like! Simply ummage through your old hardware, get components for one computer, build yourself a case in the desired shape, and install Linux". Of course, this is a recipe for a 100% customized server running Linux, but it's not really the innovation of the century.

Seeing that they even left out the interesting parts, such as the software for the LC display, I'm sort of disappointed. I'm running a custom FreeBSD server in a custom case myself, now should I post it everywhere for geeks to look at?

I didn't know about the CompactFlash IDE hacks, though. Seeing the current prices for CompactFlash cards, however, this is not an option either.

Summary: So What?

"Where do I buy one?"...

[Erazmus]

I've noticed recently that when someone posts a story about a neat hardware hack like this, there's a whole bunch of "Where can I buy one" posts. Comments like "If the site gets slashdotted so quick, I wouldn't want to buy from them". This isn't a product for sale. It's a step-by-step description of a hardware hack - a rather cool one at that!

Checkout rackable systems for compact 1U machines

[seichert]

Rackable systems at www.rackable.com has half width 1 U machines. They can get 80 machines in a standard rack plus a 4U network switch on both sides. Very impressive. They are used by google and others.
Stuart Eichert

Why doesn't Slashdot mirror/cache before posting ?

[Curious__George]

How difficult would it be for Slashdot/Parent corporation to mirror a page and cache it's images before posting a story. Then they could publish the link to the original site AND provide the alternates (behind a relay on distributed servers) in the event that the slashdot effect caved the originating server.

It would only be necessary for a day or so, assuming the original site owner didn't move the original content or take it down due to the unwanted attention.

I'd have to believe that the server admins on the originating site would appreciate this more than the debilitating amount of traffic coming their way with little or no warning.

I have a hard time believing that Slashdot doesn't have the resources to do this.

Curious George

The curse of /.

[djve]

The site's down. probably due to too many trying to see it. The rest of youget in line, I was here first. :-) Looks like I'll try tomorrow. djve

Crusoe-powered Netwinders

[Anonymous Coward]

Crusoe-powered Netwinders:

http://www.netwinder.net/3400/specifications.phtml (rackmount)

http://www.netwinder.net/3100/specifications.phtml (desktop)

Re:Crusoe-powered Netwinders

[Geek In Training]

Aren't you glad I was reading at -1 today? :)

AC said: Crusoe-powered Netwinders:

http://www.netwinder.net/3400/specifications.phtml (rackmount)

http://www.netwinder.net/3100/specifications.phtml (desktop)

Flash RAM is very reliable

[Bryan Andersen]

Actually FLASH ram drives can be quite reliable. What you do is mount your root read only them make a ram disk to mount /tmp on. Do the same for any partition you need to do writes in. If you need more space than your flash card has you can do the trick they do on boot floppies and compress the root partition and load it into a ram disk. Sure this burns more ram, but then how much ram does a router need? 32MB should do just fine for most routers. I only have 16MB in mine. If you had 64MB or 128MB of memory in the system, you would have plenty for the OS and a sizeable ram disk.

I've been looking at doing something along the same lines for my firewall and web server. For the web server I'd use 2 raided 80GB hard disks and not use a flash disk, but the firewall would be run off of one. The main reason I'm looking at this is power consumption. Right now I'm sucking down about 200 Watts between the firewall and web server. If figure I could lower this to less than 50watts total for both.

1 CPU in a Half 1U... try 8 or 16

[LuxuryYacht]

We've been doing some very dense "how about a beocluster of those" kinds of designs lately and 2 cpu per 1U is pretty much off the shelf. 16 cpu's per 1U has been working quite well. You just have to get away from any cooling techniques based on air convection like most 1U servers use and start thinking conduction cooling to get the heat out of the small enclosure. Look for 8 Crusoe Processor per 1U servers poping up from a few vendors later on this summer. The new Intel Very Low Voltage P-III's also look good for this along with SMP chipsets.

Re:Um... Why?

[snowshovelboy]

The reason why is that pile of approximately 83 486s and other various parts that is sitting in a corner in my basement.

Google Cache Page

[webword]

Get it here via Google, but without pictures.

WebWord -- Industrial Strength Usabiltity

When was this written?

[hndrcks]

"AMD's latest 486-DX/4-100 ran at 3V and kept cool with a good heatsink. Avoid Pentiums and 5Volts-486s."

It sounds like this article was written in 1995...

Re:get back to work :)

[gmag3]

Is that the energy drink or the malt liquor?

Re:Why doesn't Slashdot mirror/cache before postin

[Bosconian]

Are you Curious enough to click here?

Or would you prefer to pose another Frequently Asked Question to try to satisfy your insatiable hunger and unfathomable thirst for the feasts of knowledge?

Another game you could play would be to see how many of the other things you were thinking of spouting off about have already been covered within those pages. I'm willing to bet at least six, but for you, a pesky little monkey, I'd raise it to ten.

Re:Why doesn't Slashdot mirror/cache before postin

[Royster]

How difficult would it be for Slashdot/Parent corporation to mirror a page and cache it's images before posting a story. Then they could publish the link to the original site AND provide the alternates (behind a relay on distributed servers) in the event that the slashdot effect caved the originating server.

It's a FAQ.

Venereal Disease

[sharkey]

VD Linux

According to my high-school health teacher, the proper term is now "STD".

--

CF vs. Fe

[rjamestaylor]

Compact Flash memory is morte reliable than delicate hard disks? Granted, that's true in a laptop/handheld which expects to be jostled about...but my rack mounted servers I expect to stay put (even in quake-y CA). CF is a destructive medium -- what's it, 10,000 writes? Not what I want to use as a swap partition, thank you very much!

Damn, now that's a nice one!

[AFCArchvile]

Only problem will be getting all those monitors hooked up to the one in the rack. A 64-port KVM switch might need to be designed.

Either way, this homebrew invention could double the power of a server closet. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these little things!

Re:Damn, now that's a nice one!

[netik]

It's interesting to hear people make statements about this when they're new to designing large scale clusters of machines. Dealing with issues such as "How do we get access to the box remotely?" and "How can I see what the machine is doing" are problems that people have solved with console servers for years. We do this all the time with our clusters of Sun Netra boxes, and you can do, even with a linux box.

Any decent Cisco box (get a cheap 25xx series router) can be used as a remote access console server if the machines you are plugging into support serial consoles. You just need to insert a 64 port async card into the 25xx router and then cable up all of the serial ports.

I'd hope that the machine has a bios that can support a serial console; Few systems do, and this is a trend I'd like to see fixed as people start producing more and more linux boxes. Even if the BIOS doesn't support that, you can at least edit inittab to give you a pty on com1: and then use your console server to talk to that.

Re:Damn, now that's a nice one!

[psergiu]

The Real Weasel Does.
--

Re:Damn, now that's a nice one!

[Chagrin]

Yeah, but space is already too limited to throw in another ISA card. Putting the serial console into the BIOS is really the way things should be done.

Re:Checkout rackable systems for compact 1U machin

[crucini]

I looked at their site, and found no such thing. Could you cite the actual URL? I found only 1ru, 2ru, 3ru and accessories.

COMPLETE Mirror With *ALL* Images

[Tesser]

A complete mirror of the site, with all the images, is available at http://wtarreau.free.fr/1u/. Enjoy!

Rack mount power supplies

[Azza]

This might be slightly offtopic, but why put the power supply inside the box? If you're going to run a bunch of these in a rack, why not have a larger, dedicated power supply that can feed 12v/5v straight to the boxes? Does anyone do this? It'd be another way to reduce heat inside the case, too.

Re:Rack mount power supplies

[Chagrin]

I thought about that sort of thing too -- it'd be a lot nicer to mount a seperate power supply box and then feed those cables. You'd also be able to introduce a lot of benefit in the form of redundant power supply / multiple outlets, etc.

Re:Wow, only 32 comments and it's slashdotted alre

[Denial of Service]

Serving dynamic content, I saw sustained load averages of over 14 and pushed out 1.9G in 8 hours when I got nailed. I was still able to SSH in during all this, so color me impressed.

---

Hard Disk

[geoffeg]

The case looks like it could still hold a small (laptop size) hard drive. Find a dead laptop and rip it out. I don't know what kind of interface laptop hard drives usually use but I'm guessing its some kind of IDE interface with power on the cable. It would add a slight bit of heat, some noise and as for the reliability, well, you probably want to backup the flash card anyways. Also, throwing a small fan on the side of the case and some small vent holes on the other (stratically placed) might just help overall. A powersupply, CPU and that display (I have one, it gets a little hot on the back) do generate some heat, cant hurt.

Also, I know that someone (3com or intel I think) makes a PCI based ethernet card that is teeny-tiny. Even then, PCMCIA network cards are quite small and getting really cheap and linux supports them quite nicely (3com's at least).

It might also be interesting to have the base-machine boot off a network via NFS for all its main stuff and then read the content for whatever its serving off a hard disk, making more space for the content on the disk.

I realize that this was just a little for-fun project for them and I'm just brainstorming about the possibility of my own version! Anyone in the Cincinnati area wanna get together and make one? :)

Geoff

Re:Hard Disk

[wtarreau]

Hard disk, battery, and small network and/or PCI cards have already been planned on the newer release. This release was really for fun, but we are working on the new one which is a bit referenced at the end of the page with the photos. There are also other reduction concepts which we can't develop here but which interest ISPs. Concerning the hard disk, we feel better accessing a fast file server (netapp) than integrating a hard disk which needs backup and may fail one day. There's already some room for this on our schemas. This disk should mainly be used for swap and cache, and we have many many applications that don't need any storage. Regards, Willy

Slashdoted?

[autocracy]

Warning! we have just been Slashdoted.

Got spell check on that thing?

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

Re:Slashdoted?

[autocracy]

Let me explain a few things to you: 1) I've read the FAQ, and I understand capped karma. Obviously in order to cap it, it must only go down (duh) 2) You're apparently new a /., and might be wondering why you have been moderated as a troll... let me hint in that it's because you tried posting something for karma and it wasn't good - it's the perfect troll recipe. 3) IT'S MY SIG AND YOU QUOTED IT WRONG!

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

What a surprize !!!!

[wtarreau]

Hi ! we were really surprized to see that our server has been slashdot'ed !!! The ADSL line has gone down when we read the message so we had to go back to work to mirror the site on a more solid site (free.fr). We are happy to say that the server wasn't loaded more than 10% at full line rate, just before this last one came down (thank you france telecom). Hopefully free won't go down :-) Until the time france telecom will do something (5 hours left), the LCD panel view won't be available. Sorry for the inconvenience. The site is now http://1u.webhop.net/ (which will redirect you to http://wtarreau.free.fr/1u/ ) Thanks to all of yours, this really is a happy night for both of us :-) For those who worry about the flash, don't worry, it's mounted read-only, so it won't be quickly destroyed. The /tmp is a ramfs. We only have to mount it R/W for reconfiguration. Cheers, Willy & Benoit

FiberCycle: 12 Crusoes per U

[Wesley Felter]

http://www.fibercycle.com/news_and_events/archives _pr/pr_010221.html

What about a colourful rackmount server?

[OlderFeeb]

http://www.spinserver.com

(ok, blatant plug for something i'm working on - but it's at least more *colourful* than the other rackmount servers about. and it fits standard hardware too)

JD

Re:CF vs. Fe

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't agree more. That's why you *don't* use it as a swap partition - use a ramdisk for that.

Set up the ffs on hd, tweak it until you're happy, then blat it onto flash.

No further writes.

Of course, if you're working with defence (s/c/s/p) contractors, the whole flash becomes classified as soon as they burn it, which can be awkward if it is soldered onto the board and they want to send the board back...

Can be much smaller

[wwwillem]

Have a look at for example JK-Micro's stuff. In a box the size of two cigarette packs, you get a complete i386 PC, on board Ethernet (ne2000) and (optional) a 32M DiskOnChip. What remains to be done is to port Linux to this hardware.

LCD Distributor/driver?

[www.acid.cx]

Where can I obtain a LCD similar to the one used at a reasonable price in the US? Thanks.

Re:Um... Why?

[Chelloveck]

The question is still, "Why?" If you have a huge pile of old hardware (and who doesn't?) that you want to use as a server farm, why bother individually sculpting each one of them to fit dinky half-of-1U form factor? Odds are that half the motherboards are too big for it, anyway. Wouldn't you be better off just using the cases you have (or if you don't have cases, just power supplies and bare boards) instead of trying to make all these little bonsai computers?

Chelloveck