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Notebooks and Mini ITX Machines as Home Servers?
An anonymous reader asks: "I recently moved into a townhouse (the first time on my own, actually) and need to get a server up and running before the other trivial stuff (furniture, getting food in the fridge, *getting* a fridge, etc, etc). I need the basic set of services - HTTP, FTP, DNS, SMTP/POP3 for any self respecting geek. The drawback is that I'm on a limited budget (money and space wise) and need a server that is *extremely* energy efficient, takes up little space, makes no noise, and generates very little heat. A basic P4 notebook seems to fit the bill - small, low power consumption, built in screen/keyboard/mouse (no need for KVM), wireless so I can stick it on the top shelf of my closet, and generates less heat and noise than your average desktop. Is there any reason to consider, say, a mini ITX rig (such as a shuttle) over this? Any drawbacks?"
A Mini-ITX rig, with an integrated Via C3 processor, will probably perform about as well as an Intel Celeron, a little bit weaker in the floating-point realm.
These machines are designed to be low-power, high-efficiency machines, where the emphasis is a quiet, cool system, rather than a high-performance one. For instance -- home theatre, mobile audio/video (car, truck) or light terminals in high-traffic areas. Many of them have hardware assisted MPEG decoding, to allow them to play DVDs and such in a home-theatre setting without heating up or glitching due to the limitations of the CPU.
If you wanted to run one of these as a TCP service provider (http, ftp, etc.) you're probably fine. But I wouldn't use this for anything "heavy" including, a high-volume e-mail server, Active Directory or DNS server, etc. The CPU just doesn't have enough power to push these services with sufficient performance.
Cliffnotes:
Mini-ITX: Good for light useage. Applications: Personal HTTPd/FTPd, personal e-mail server, home router, file server.
Bad applications: Active Directory / PDC, DNS, etc.
The Via Eden processor is *designed* to use little power. It doesn't even need a fan. You can buy mini-itx boards with an eden processor.
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My biggest disappointment is the noise level. There are three fans in the thing: CPU, PS, and Case.
I can't really speak to power since I power on/off the unit as I need it.
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My point is about the HD. I use a 10GB 2.5in notebook harddrive in here, for noise and heat considerations. My Exim SMTP proxy and Squid run GREAT, no real issue aboutthe form-factor. This has served me for 2-plus years. I tar the whole thing up nightly - via SSH - onto my big workstation. Even if the drive blows, I pop another cheapie in the box, boot with Knoppix, and restore!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Stay away from the shuttles, they're pricey. You can pick up a compatible P3 LAN motherboard, a cheap PSU, some PC133 RAM, and an 800 mhz Socket 370 C3 for around 100 dollars. Put it in a box with a pre-existing HDD and a fan, and you have a server for 1/8th the cost of a new Laptop.
After setting it up, you won't interact with it via the screen / keyboard anyway, so don't bother.
And if your C3 costs are getting too high, pick up a $200 lindows box at walmart.com. Just remember to upgrade the fans to Panaflos, as the walmart box is tremendously, tremendously loud.
BTW, for more silencing tips, visit SilentPCReview.com. That's Silent PC Review dot C-O-M.
The ______ Agenda
Agreed. I bought a used Compaq Armada with a cracked case and a battery that was NFG. Plugged it into an UPS, slapped OpenBSD on it and configured PF. Makes a dandy firewall and PPPoE box for my DSL connection, is low-power and silent.
Another poster warned about HD reliability, though. We'll see what happens.
I've seen problems as well. Things like crashes that seemed to be related to heat (fans worked and could be heard cycling on and off continuously during kernel builds). Also, older notebooks can have a flaky APM bios that will cause fits. Also, there seems to be a much higher variance in the quality of hardware and drivers for things like the NIC and modem with some not working under heavy load, some drivers not liking some implementations of common hardware (Tulip to name one). Finally, notebook hardware and drivers don't seem to be as debugged for things like running multiple NIC's and such. If you can afford a newer notebook, some of these problems should go away. Otherwise, google is your friend, research the model you want.
Getting a P4 notebook or a mini-itx rig might even be overkill.
Think about it, how fast does a household server need to be? Assuming that you don't have anything more than a 1.5mbps 'net connection (which I highly dobut), you don't need massive processing power, or all the bells and whistles of a P4 notebook or Mini-ITX system. A Pentium3 or Pentium2 notebook may perfectly fit the bill. You can easily find a used P2 or P3 very cheaply.
That being said, I would steer clear of the VIA-powered systems. A 1ghz VIA chip is said to be slower than a 400mhz celron (ouch!). The P4/Athlon-based Mini-ITX rigs are a much better bet in terms of performance, but they will draw more power and make more noise (unless you choose to underclock the chip -- this has been proven to produce good results).
Of course, you may want to revaluate why you're even doing this. Why does a server need to consume low power and be quiet?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I too have been looking into putting together a small media server/web services
machine. A little research turned up, Mini-ITX.
I would start here, its a pretty good site that has a lot of information of
what you can do with mini-itx and features note worthy products as they come
out. Personally I think what you need is a HUSH.
Its the size of a dvd player, its completely silent and its so low power that
the power supply (95watts I think it is) is external. It might not be the cheapest
itx option out there but it fits all your (and mine) requirements and adds the
nice look factor aswell. They seem like a pretty good shop and they even let
you buy it without an OS, which I'm sure you'll (and me too but for different
reasons) appreciate. If you do get one I suggest getting it with 128ram and
buying more ram elsewhere, they're based in Germany and the value of the Euro
really shoots up the price of ram (and everything else I imagine). Btw I don'
work for these guys so don't assume I do, but I'd gladly trade a free one for
advertising these guys as often as possible.
And before anyone says it, I have imagined a beowulf cluster of these :)
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
The gray ("Graphite"), blue ("Indigo") and white ("snow") models look nice and fit into most decors. They were selling new for about $800 until recently. Used ones should be in the $500 range.
Note that the G4-based flat panel iMacs and the G4-based CRT eMacs have CPU fans.
Just wanted to point this out. Not to be a jerk.
Actually, the ITX machines do use much less electricity. Mini-ITX.com has a 55w passively cooled sealed PSU that will power most setups.
And if you have the inclination and about 425 pounds to spare, you can get a totally fanless Via setup with a silent Seagate Barracuda (the 5400 RPM Seagate IV is legendary). That's as silent as you can get without resorting to Compact Flash.
Pros:
Dead silent
Cheap replacement parts
High coolness factor
Sort-of expandable
Low power consumption
Cons:
Bang per dollar
The ______ Agenda
I used an old Tecra 500 laptop as my original FW, it worked well for about almost two years. The biggest problem with laptops is heat. As the original poster mentioned, laptops are not meant for continous use. I fried four PCMCIA network cards, and finally the MB died.
Sparc 5s were our DNS servers for a site with 500 machines and a 100mbit/sec internet connection. A Sparc 10 was our mail server for the same location (a previous job).
what do you mean a mini-itx system doesn't have enough cpu power to handle dns and mail. get real. stop running exchange.
I used an old notebook (TI TM4000M 486/75) for a firewall and print server. The LCD screen was broken so I just removed it. I could do pretty much everything from a network connection to it and I used an external monitor while setting it up. I used two bargain pccard NIC's. A neat benefit of using an old notebook like this is that you have an automatic UPS for it because it will switch over to battery and you can have it save your print queue to disk.
I used the notebook as a fileserver in college, but that was a bad idea. The hard drive could not handle this. The case of a notebook is tight and with the disk usually spinning there was no opportunity for it to cool down. After one weekend of this the drive was toast. Maybe newer laptops deal better with this. It was fun to replace the internal disk and see how everything was crammed in there though. Plus I was able to replace it with a bigger drive.
This one had a SCSI connector and I did have an old external dirve I used with it later. I tried to use it for file serving again, but there was no way to put enough memory in the machine to use it practically for something like this. With such a low power laptop like this you should be able to do PPPoE, firewall, and print server well but that is about it.