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

[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.

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.

/.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

[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.

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...

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

./ 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

[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?
:)

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/

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

[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.

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..

[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.

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

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).

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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

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

/. 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: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

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."

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?

Crusoe-powered Netwinders

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Google Cache Page

[webword]

Get it here via Google, but without pictures.

WebWord -- Industrial Strength Usabiltity

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!

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.

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!

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).

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.

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

Slashdoted?

[autocracy]

Warning! we have just been Slashdoted.

Got spell check on that thing?

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

FiberCycle: 12 Crusoes per U

[Wesley Felter]

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

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

[psergiu]

The Real Weasel Does.
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