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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.
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
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]
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.
A beige G3 (used ~$250) or an iMac (used between ~$350-$600) will work extremely well, and that's the setup I'm running here. Plop a $120 120 gig drive in the beasty and at least 128 megs of RAM an you're loaded for bear.
/semantics
As a bonus, the iMac is plugged in on a shelf in the closet then connected over Airport, the monitor's set to power off after 5 minutes. Hard drive spins down after 1 hour of inactivity (seems to work best for me... the 5 second spin-up isn't usually noticable, and that should help extend the life of el cheapo drive)
That machine works as my home office's HTTP/FTP/Firewall/Router/POP/SMTP box/MP3 Repository/sliMP3 server/render farm manager. It's got plenty enough horsepower to even do a decent amount of real-time GDlib/Imagemagick work on some of my PHP/SQL development sites, and almost real-time PDF generation on-the-fly. It's also got various cronnable tasks running for logging and workstation maintenance.
As long as you're using the machine as a server and not interacting with Aqua (G3-class machines without Quartz extreme have some serious overhead when using Aqua), you've got more than enough power for what you're asking.
I've also got a shuttle box (SB51G) that's the most sound piece of Wintel hardware I've ever owned -- dirt cheap, super fast and it has AGP (IE testing, Maya and gaming is all Win's good for for me, anyhow -- I might as well have AGP). Reasonably cheap to put together ($250ish barebones) and Red Hat and Mandrake run very well on it if you're stuck on the Intel/AMD side of the fence.
I'm a scavenger and recycler myself when it comes to home servers. Web & file sharing services really don't require that much horsepower -- and OS X is *way* more elegant to administer than most Linux distros I've experienced.
But if you're looking at the Shuttle boxes and convinced to go that route, they're mighty sound, even if they aren't mini ITX. I believe they're technically micro-ATX.