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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 setup should be signifigantly cheaper than a P4 laptop. It also is somewhat upgradable, though that depends on the exact MB you get. I would look into the VIA Epia/Edens, as they are extremely enegery efficent and produce very little heat.
Twostep
There are 10 different types of people in this world... those who understand binary, and those who don't.
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.
I did this with an old P120 laptop, and I had over 500 days of uptime (well, it rolled over at 497).
Some cautions to consider: laptops aren't designed as servers. I've heard stories of hard drives not surviving continuous use. Newer systems with fans still generate noise and heat--be sure it's ventilated.
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.
There\'s no place like ~
I have a P4 2Ghz, with 17" monitor, laser printer, router, Cisco ATA and scanner that is up and running 24/7, and out monthly power bill is around $20. That is here in Southern California, where our electricity bills are ridiculously high too. That $20 power bill also takes into account that we use a lot of lights, and usually have the tv going.
This leads me to ask, why spend a bunch of money on a notebook or shuttle case to use as a server? If you're on a tight budget, won't one of those cost you a lot more than a regular PC would use in power?
Consider a used notebook. While the built-in screen is a nice convenience, you could possibly find one really cheap with a broken screen.
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.
This is a boring sig
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 $200 lindows box at walmart.com. Just remember to upgrade the fans to Panaflos, as the walmart box is tremendously, tremendously loud.
BTW, for more silencing tips, visit SilentPCReview.com. That's Silent PC Review dot C-O-M.
The ______ Agenda
I remember when a previous employer had four servers set up in a mini-rack. It was a very efficient use of space. As far as a laptop goes.
Options:
Get an old pentium and make do, for 350.
Best Buy has HP 1.8ghz celeron lappy's for 699 and up
If you do need the power of a P4, then you will probably have to pay for it.
Pros of the laptop:
Built in UPS
Very low power consumption
Cons:
compatibility may be an issue if you run linux
longevity not as good as server
bang per dollar
OTOH, you mention the mini-itx cases. Why? Because they are cool? I don't think they use any less power than a full size. Is there a space constraint?
with the mini itx
Pros
Cheaper
sort-of expandable
cheaper replacement parts
looks cool -- chicks dig it
Cons
more power usage
I guess my big question is what are you gonna do with it? "The usual geek stuff" can be handled with a P-300 last I checked-- just buy an old laptop. But also, is power that expensive? You are *buying* a house, the ten bucks a month in electric surely won't bust ya. I don't get it.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
You can get a number of units that will be smaller, cheaper, quieter, and produce less heat than either Mini-ITX or a laptop.
For instance:
http://www.soekris.com/
It's an X86 PC that boots off of a CF card. Perhaps you could use this with an external HD enclosure, or network-mounted storage?
Agreed. I bought a used Compaq Armada with a cracked case and a battery that was NFG. Plugged it into an UPS, slapped OpenBSD on it and configured PF. Makes a dandy firewall and PPPoE box for my DSL connection, is low-power and silent.
Another poster warned about HD reliability, though. We'll see what happens.
The laptop has a poor CPU/$ ratio and those little laptop drives aren't very speedy compared to the average 3.5" disk.
Best bang for the buck is probably an off-the-shelf compact system with a low-end processor in it. Use power management and a LCD screen and the power consumption/heat won't be too bad. Replace the fans with quiet ones and tuck it in a corner somewhere. Go see what's available cheap at the big chains, or check out the compact machines that Dell is making these days...
-Bill
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 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.
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.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
Ive had to look for a small minimalist firewall+server, and the best thing Ive come across is an old Pentium1 IBM system. Its low-profile, and the power supply is 200W. 200MHz and 64MB Ram using FreeBSD has been enough for me serving 7 domains with their webpages, mysql and postgresql, qmail with virtualhosts, ircd, samba, VPN and other things I cant remember. Ive also installed similar systems at other places including homes and offices, and manage them through ssh. Uptimes have been since the installation and have never had a performance problemo.
Am thinking now to replace the IBM system with a Sun Ultra 5, just for the heck of it. I dont think you should go for a power-guzzling Duron or any system with a loud processor fan. Nor should you have to go with an ATX tower with extra drive bays. Be minimalistic and efficient and you wont need a Pentium4 unless you plan to serve your webpage through an IBM Websphere and DB2.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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.
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.
The idea of batteries as a UPS is kind of a problem. You'll probably fry the expensive battery in less than a year. I only use batteries when I need to move the machines and run on a real UPS the rest of the time.
Memory on an older laptop can be a problem. The ones I have use EDO SO-DIMMs. Going from 2x64m to 2x128m would cost me $300-800. If I had picked laptops that used a pair of SDRAM sticks, I could probably get to 256m for $50.
One of my biggest problems with using these laptops as servers is that it feels like such a waste. I've got friends that could still squeeze a good bit of life out of them, especially on a wireless lan. In fact I've given away most of my stack and I'm down to just one busted-up spare.
For what it's worth, old laptops can make great servers for low-intensity use. One trick I've used before is to remove the hard disk and replace it with a compactflash card attached to a CF2.5" IDE adaptor in order to A. replace the only moving part with something less failure prone and B. make the laptop silent instead of merely quiet.
The only caveat is that you need to have enough ram for your application to never need swap (64 meg is more than enough for basic non-X, non-java server and/or firewall use). Never ever run a swap file or partition on flash media - you will quickly exhaust the limited write cycles of the flash media.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Oh bollocks.
Sparc 5s and Sparc 10s ran on CPUs that would be considered underpowered in a PDA these days.
Sure, they got good throughput compared with PCs of the time thanks to their more sensible bus, but they don't stand a hope in Hell of keeping up with any modern CPU (and that includes C3s).