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?"

Comments

smaller, cheaper, better

[MSG]

You can get a number of units that will be smaller, cheaper, quieter, and produce less heat than either Mini-ITX or a laptop.

For instance:
http://www.soekris.com/

It's an X86 PC that boots off of a CF card. Perhaps you could use this with an external HD enclosure, or network-mounted storage?

My server

[GiMP]

I have a pentium 166 as my router/firewall. I put in an old 256 megabyte harddrive, installed Linux, setup iptables, then copied the important files to a tmpfs filesystem, remounted / read-only, and spun-down the harddrive. A completely quiet system (the processor doesn't need a fan).

If you need more speed for some reason, try a Via C3 processor. With a good heatsink you shouldn't need a fan at all.. even if, the fans required make little or no noise.

I found that harddrives are too loud. If you need to write to the disk, get one of those 'low noise' harddrives. Alternatively, you can try a flash disk which would be quiet and wouldn't have to be spun-down; however, you would only have a limited number of writes.

Best of both worlds

[Hardwyred]

What I have done is purchase a socket 370 Via C3 online (they go for like 30 bucks for a 900Mhz that uses very little power) and then just used an old socket 370 mini atx case (ya know, the one with 2 PCI slots and EVERYTHING else built onboard). No harddrives in it, I run everything off of CD and use Ramdisks for RW stuff. It's a little noisy when it first boots up but after 45 seconds or so, it's as quiet as a powersupply fan and a CPU fan can be. Cheap too, I think I have a total of 60 bucks invested (god love ebay). So in short, be a geek and build your own. The power difference over a year between the eden boards and a C3 you can buy will amount to a super sized extra value meal over a year.

Re:Laptops work, but be careful

[LordNimon]

If you disable all logging, a properly configured laptop with enough memory should almost never go to disk. The laptop will then power down the hard drive. Some exceptions would be if you had a POP3 and/or SMTP server.

Hmmm... that would be a useful FAQ: How to configure a Linux server to minimize/eliminate disk I/0.