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Energy Efficient and Cheap Servers for Home Use?
CapnRob asks: "I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network in the (small) apartment we're now living in. We'd like to set up a firewall/mail server/small-file-server, but all the machines we own right now are pretty big machines that pull a fair amount of power, and that we don't want to keep running 24/7. Since our mail and file server needs are pretty low, our ideal box would be something like a Linksys WRT45G with one of the open source firmwares ... if only you could add a small hard drive to it. We're both long-time FreeBSD users, so installing a *nix system is no big deal, but what I've found so far in this line needs more l337 soldering iron skillz than I've got. Any suggestions for tiny little cheap boxes that won't send our power bills into orbit?"
SparcStation IPX (or even IPC) I ran one of these clever little buggers for a few years, very low on power, quiet as a churchmouse and houses one harddrive (but at todays disk sizes that's plenty) the architecture is pretty fast and 64MB of RAM was more than adequate. You can pick these little beasties up on eBay for next to nothing so spare parts shouldn't be a problem, either (I actually bought a second for spares.) I was running RedHat 6.1 for months at a time without a hiccup.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Soekris boxes are exactly what you're looking for. They're cheap, stable, low power, interface-rich and run FreeBSD like a dream. They're super boxes.
You found a BSD chick? roxxor!
Move into an apartment with utilities included.
AC 24/7, free electricity... It's like a server farm in here.
Saw a story at a home recording enthusiast site (sorry that I don't recall which) about using a Mini ITX mobo and a flash memory card instead of a HDD (I think they put knoppix on a 1gb CF) for a low-power, low-heat, nearly no noise solution for a recording studio.
I guess the same solution would work for a low power home firewall & mail server, and have the added advantage of being really nice and quiet too.
You could possibly sub a low power laptop HDD if you needed more storage space.
Just a thought.
Start a happiness pandemic
http://www.mini-itx.com/
I'm using an old P233 box as a server. It's not exactly a small box, but it doesn't draw much power. If you want a small form factor as well, look into VIA C3-based computers.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I'm using an old Pentium 166Mhz for my network server and find that it works great. In fact, it's probably overkill. I've got 128mb ram, some old small (~10GB disks), and a couple of network cards. The machine is running an internal dhcp server, a samba server, an lpd server, and a firewall under RH 7.3. The power consumption is quite low - I think the power supply is 200W.
If you're planning on making the file server accessable from online, whatever you do, don't post the link. I've never heard of a slashdotted house before, but I can't imagine how hard it would be.
Geek guys never find a geek girl that has actually used FreeBSD or any open source OS. The only geek girls that exist are those hot cam girls that take their clothes off.
Maybe you could get an old used notebook, even with a broken display? That should be pretty silent and need low power.
I am using a Syntax Via 1200+ Motherboard with CPU From TigerDirect when they were having a sale(I came to 10$USD, I grabbed a small MicroATX case from NewEgg and it works beautifully, and is small and quiet. It kinda takes a while to emerge everything, yeah Gentoo user here :D. but it works great and does not use much power.
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
Perhaps give up the wife and then a big massive AMD-64 system would fit in nicely.
I was thinking a Shuttle PC would be fine, but I don't have much experience with them. Have you thought about just buying a used laptop? Power usage is pretty low, the profile is small, and people seem to junk perfectly good machines. Probably the only problem there would be support for the network card and if FreeBSD supports it. I've actually turned some busted up Laptops into Kiosks and it works pretty well.
Mini-box make some neato little ITX boxes which you could hook up to any number of storage solutions. Past that, I've had good success with Mini-ITX boards. I get the cases from Web-tronics, as the MITX ones are very, very expensive -- they're meant to make your MITX look like a CD player, pretty much, and I can do more without having to worry about cosmetics. MiniBox (above) sells snap-in MITX power supplies ranging from 60w to 200w. For the extra cool factor, use a Xenarc display or use something 'headless', e.g., LCDProc and Crystalfontz. (As I remember, the MiniBoxes come with their own little displays.)
Laptops are generally very efficient on power. And they come with their own screen too. In fact, I heard of one company that replaced all of it's desktops with Thinkpads and used power as the single justification (the computer takes less, the monitor takes less, and less heat generated requires less AC).
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
I was concerned about electricity use as well (seeing as I live here in California with our triple rate overuse fees), but when I actually hooked a multi-meter up to my little PII-450 gateway/fileserver, I found consumption to be much less that I expected... about $7/month, even at our super high rates.
I have several old laptops that I current run as servers. It seems that it is quite common for old laptop batteries to die and refuse to hold a charge. Suddenly, they become pretty decent servers if you set them up to remain running with the top closed.
I suspect that you will find a few of these 'battery-less' laptop on ebay for a good price as the lack of mobility will really effect the asking price for a laptop. Snap them up and get all the cheap servers you will ever need.
I'm was in the same situation. However, while this isn't the "green" environtment-friendly solution. I decided just to leave on my server. The extra expense saved on my power bill would take years to pay for any kind of low-watt server I would be able to build.
There is no disk controller in the LinkSys router, but you might be able to hack the firmware to use a network attached disk (it DOES have a few network connections 8^), but then the cost of the NAS is such that the whole solution would probably be impractical. A Soekris box (as mentioned elsewhere) or similar would be a better solution, perhpas.
I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network in the (small) apartment we're now living in. We'd like to set up a firewall/mail server/small-file-server ....
Dude, honestly, none of us believe you. You should have included a link to your marriage certificate and a picture of yourselves. People posting articles on Slashdot aren't married.
Besides, you just got married, and your interested in the network ?????
Dude, your wife has complete access to the network? Where do you keep your pr0n?
www.gumstix.com + a usb drive + a little hacking
Epia-based systems are on the small side, and draw minimal power. Some people have gone a little overboard customizing theirs. If you're putting the system in an enclosed space where noise might be an issue, I recommend going with a power-brick over a case with a standard power supply. Mine sits quietly in the corner serving up Samba goodness off of RH9.
As a matter of fact computers don't use as much power as you think. The monitor can sometimes use more power than that computer itself. Run BSD on a G5 or Sparc and use flash memory, (a little expensive) but the fastest and least power using alternative and you should be good to go!
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
Don't think you can buy them new (at least cheaply) but look for an old Netwinder. I got one on eBay a couple of years ago for abougt $150. Low power, two ethernet ports, easy to manage and small. Not a barn burner by any means, but for a firewall / file server / print server it works perfect.
Brother in law gave me an old gateway Pentium MMX 133, 32 mb ram, 4 gb HD. Put two pcmcia net cards in it, and put OpenBSD running PF. Perfect.
How about the NSLU2?
It has been covered before on Slashdot and is hackable just like the router you mentioned.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
The WRT54G isn't the only thing from Linksys that runs Linux. The NSLU2 is a designed to be a NAS solution. But you can hack the firmware to run practically whatever you want. Supports up to two hard drives (connected via USB) and has an Intel XScale (ARM) processor. It has no fans, so the only noise comes from the drive(s) you attach to it. You can pick one up for about $80.
Try the Axentra Home Series servers http://www.axentra.com/
:: A story about blowing the whistle and all the things that can go wrong.
They H-50 uses a VIA C3 800 MHz processor which is low power. I actually like the setup and configuration options. Also, the e-mail system is great.
Snake Oil
(http://www.snakeoil.ca/)
An exploration of mixology, spirits and bartending.
I don't know if it would work, haven't tried it, but something like:
3 5&scid=43&prid=640 coupled with the Linux-running Linksys? (Does it have the ability to mount remote drives? I'm assuming it does...)
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=283, http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=352, or http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=
geek. lawyer.
I use an old Pentium 100 laptop for this. It's nice having a battery in the server as well.
I just installed a US Robotics "USR8200" unit here and can give it a firm recommendation. It looks like your typical router with firewall, with 2 USB 2.0 ports and a firewire port, it can be a pretty good file server too. Install the new just released official firmware and it adds adds print serving and the ability to have it do "family friendly" content screening is available with a small monthly fee subscription if you really want to do that.
Slim, cheap, low power, even have fanless models. I use this for my email server.
_ sl im.asp?Cate.id=19
http://www.idotpc.com/TheStore/minibook/default
In principle, coeteris paribus - that is, assuming the same fabrication process - RISC platforms are more energy-efficient than x86 for the same performance levels.
This is true in particular of the ARM platform, but also of the PowerPC and, perhaps in minor degrees, others like MIPS or SPARC.
So if you could get yourself an ARM box (like the NetWinder, or even something more recent - ask at debian-arm@lists.debian.org for example) you're set. The Pegasos PPC boxes are also worthy a look, fanless too.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Two types of solutions, I don't know your budget/storage expectations
r ver_a ppliances/home_series_net-box/
1) A soekris net4801 with some CF disk: very efficient. Use a USB drive if you need more storage (or cheaper). A bit slow, though.
http://www.soekris.com. Probably not your better option, but good to know
2) An Axentra appliance such as the H50
http://www.axentra.com/products/multifunc_se
A more powerful option, at a reasonable price.
Running Linux with full shell access, the software included seems very convenient: I would think twice before putting my favorite distro on it.
Get an older laptop, put a PCMCIA or USB ethernet to give you a second ethernet (connect that to the DSL/Cablemodem uplink).
Low power: Obviously, laptops have to be low power.
Low space: Laptops are small. Disable the "I've closed the lid" switch or get the *nix install to ignore it, fold it up, and slide it away.
Low cost: I said OLD laptop.
Built in UPS: Why do you think its called a "California Server"?
Test your net with Netalyzr
Dedicated servers are cheap these days, especially the resellers and mass hosts.
Save the power, bandwidth, and headaches, and just go buy a dedicated somewhere that's meant to house servers. Let them worry about the networking, let them worry about the power usage, and let them buy the hardware for you.
This PDF is the manual for the bare-bones Soekris 4501 - the first page has pictures of the bare board and the "box" version. It is a router/hub form factor.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
As the owner of http://www.obsolyte.com, which is running on one of these little boxes, I'd like to thank you for slashdotting my poor little server into the ground... However, I guess it's good test for the server to see if it can withstand it -- if it can, than I guess that's the box they are looking for in the "ask slashdot"....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Try Xbox Linux--- http://www.xbox-linux.org/
How about securing an old Macintosh fitted with a 603e processor, replace the original low capacity hard drive with a larger SCSI disk, and install a PowerPC variant of Linux? The 603e was well known for it's low power requirements... Heck, so was the G3, for that matter. The 603e can also get by with passive cooling, thus needing no additional power to run a processor cooling fan.
If power efficiency is what you're *really* after, no same time frame Intel product ever beat the early PowerPCs. In fact, why the hell are we even talking about Pentiums, here!? Geeze.
I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network...
No really, I'm verklempt.
Michalangelo Progr
The maintenance people said that they were afraid I was a fire hazard!
Damn, I should have kept that apartment. Heh.
Greetings:
http://openbrick.org/ is a community of folks doing this kind of stuff. I have purchased a couple of boxes from a US distributor (http://www.hacom.net/ and have been really happy. They have 3 ethernet ports, so they make great firewalls. We use CF cards for storage because we don't need the storage, but you can put little laptop harddrives in them, so you could make a file/print box if you wanted to. They'll boot off of a USB CD, so installation is a breeze. I run Debian, but have installed openbsd for kicks, also. They're cool enough that they don't need an internal fan, so they're quiet too.
I have nothing but nice things to say about them. The US distributor only takes paypal, but he has always delivered without problems. He even called back to see if I liked it.
----------
If your answer is Microsoft, you obviously didn't understand the question.
Why don't you just use an old notebook. Pentium II vintage with built in network should be ideal. Replace the hard drive with the sort of size you want. Use the built in network for your external interface (pppoe adsl or leased line or whatever) and add a 100mbit pcmcia card for your internal interface.
Not only will it be super light on juice, but it should be relatively quiet, take little space (you can close the lid) and it has a built in UPS!
sigaar
1) Do a search for the power requirements of a modern computer (any time after the invention of APM). There are plenty of studies to be found, many of them at university websites. The average computer, when it is in standby mode, uses 35W or less. When an EPA Green monitor (almost every modern monitor on Earth) is in sleep mode they use less than 1W. So, you are trying to figure out how to use less electricity than the equivalent of a small nightlight? The first time you leave your electric oven on 350 degrees for about one minute longer than your buzzer went off (assuming it is heating at the time), you most likely just spent more electrical energy than an entire month of computer server usage on full power.
2) Why are you trying to jack around buying proprietary solutions or exotic mini-computers for your needs? That's dumb as hell. My personal server at home is an old Dell P233 laptop I bought for $50. It sports 80MB of RAM, 100Mbit ethernet, and a 4GB HDD. It currently runs my Apache HTTP, SAMBA, SSHD, VNC, Postfix, and CUPS server and it is tucked away neatly on a shelf under my desk. It has been especially useful as my print server (since I have a wireless network) and MP3 SAMBA server. Power consumption? Please, this is a laptop and the power features have worked perfectly as they were intended to. Also, there has been no additional configuration with this system since its original installation outside of Linux OS security/bug/OS upgrades.
There are Mini-ITX motherboards at Fry's (a US West Coast electronics chain) that have a fanless Cyrix 600Mhz processor soldered on.
...and just an ordinary hard disk drive that's pretty quiet.
I've got mine in a simple little case that looks about like a 1990 cable TV terminal adaptor: Casetronic 2699R that has a few teensy (2"?) cooling fans and an external low-wattage power supply.
Actually, I kind of like to hear the disk say "chachunk" when an email come^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spam gets filtered.
Their NSLU2 runs Linux also.
With a light antenna:
l ig ht.antenna.reut/
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/09/17/
asus offers (or offered?) a router/wireless AP (something like that; not quite sure which. they've got several different models, but I believe it could function as both a ethernet and wireless router) that runs linux.
It has at least one (don't remember if it was two) USB ports, through which you could connect it to an external USB drive, or even something like a dongle for CF or SD.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
http://www.routerboard.com
:) add an usb external hard drive (not sure if it has usb2, i dont use it) and you're good to go
(no i won't make a goddaned link)
while designed to act as a router, this thing has a 233 mhz, intel compatible cpu, can eat up to 512 megs of ram, and works off a flash disk.
it has 2 ethernet ports (100mbits), and a USB one. i'm using one as my core router (for an ISP) and it's just a charm
I have seen at least one of the SVEASOFT (experimental) distributions that has a way for the WRT54G(S) to NFS mount a hard drive. Hope this helps.
Seriously. An old iMac of the DV series is perfect for this, except maybe for the footprint, it's bigger than a mini-ITX BSD box. Fanless so it's very silent, low power requirement, runs MacOS X or Linux or BSD. Just set it to disable the screen after one minute of inactivity for even lower power needs.
Plus it doubles as an MP3 jukebox (the Harman Kardon speakers are better than their looks would lead one to think), and with a eyeTV plugged on the FireWire, it can also replace a Tivo. You can get one cheap on Ebay or through LowEndMac.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
"We'd like to set up a firewall/mail server/small-file-server..."
IMHO, putting all your servers on your firewall is just asking for trouble. For better security, you'd do best to have one of those Linksys firewall/routers separate from your mail/file/blah-blah server.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
You can pick up a Dreamcast for about $15 USD at your local EB, and you can get it to run BSD or Linux. The only issue is you'll need the Boardband Adapter, and that will set you back a pretty penny. They go for about a hundred on Ebay, but if you can find a friend who is willing to donate one, you're all set for a small, low power server. :) You'll also need a DC keyboard, or a PS/2 -> DC adapter, which run about $15.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
Bah, this story should read, 'Real, Honest to goodness Female a FBSD user, weds, reducing available femal freebsd user pool to 0". By the way, if its lower power you want check out the Via mini-itx boards. The Eden chips go up to 1Ghz are 17cm x 17cm and use passive cooling. Plus they have hardware enabled RNG and AES acceleration that should improve security and preformance with things like ipsec.
You could probably pick up an older Zaurus (Linux PDA) cheap. The 5500 I have can take both compact flash and SD/MMC Cards, and runs on a fraction of a watt. With a compact flash ethernet card you could connect it to pretty much any router. Just mark it as your DMZ, and the incoming traffic will be routed to it. All you need do is set up a mail server on the Zaurus, maybe a little custom compiling, and you're all set.
Why buy a new box, when the payback on power bill savings will be years away? Just use one of your ol' klunkers.
Underclock it and buy a low-rpm quiet fan for $20 if it's noise you're worried about.
woohoo... congrats man.
For reference, I've measured power consumption on my laptop and my old box that acts as a linux server. The laptop is a Dell PII 366Mhz with a 15" screen that draws about 22 watts total. The server is a Dell Optiplex PII 400Mhz and draws about 30 watts without a monitor. When the hard drive is working at the max (e.g. a sustained file transfer) it goes up to about 45 watts. Overall, I find that the server costs me about $2.50 to run 24/7. I agree with others: An old laptop is probably a great solution if you can find one cheaply.
one obvious solution is mini-itx. im currently using one of these guys for my www/mail server, and i love it. its just a little bigger than a cdrom drive, it only uses a 60w power supply, its totally silent, and very stable. i've been running this thing 24/7 with no problems for the last 6 months or so. and yes, both linux and freebsd run fine on these.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
I recently put together a server with power consumption in mind. It included: 1GHz VIA cpu, 512MB RAM, two network cards, and two 40G 7200 rpm drives mirrored.
The entire computer pulled a total of 47 watts. I was even able to unplug the CPU fan once I replaced the heat sink.
I have one of these:e /
http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/cerfcub
Add a microdrive for storage. Doesn't win awards for speed, storage or ram but the ~3 inch cube takes nearly no space, looks cool, is silent and draws very little power.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
to do it use a very large RAM disk loaded from the flash, which you then either batch copy into the flash FS at intervals, or at shutdown. (The latter is more likely as DRAM is as cheap or cheaper than Compact Flash capacity-wise).
Hence the flash is really only there to help it between power cycles, or to "back" in-flight data.
I could probably find one... but there should be a flash/RAM fs that does mostly everything in memory with an update-to-backing-flash-at-interval feature. Or you could somehow tune the buffer cache to be _really_ lazy about when it gets around to writing, and only to write in huge sequential blocks.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
These may be a bit more pricey than you're looking for, but they're not too expensive, and are certainly small:
Cappuccino PC
since you mentioned the wrt54g you might be also interested in the Linksys NSLU2. It's got a single ethernet port, dual usb ports and can run linux. Attach a usb harddrive to it and you can use it for your file/mail server. The open source firmwares aren't as polished as, say sveasoft but it seems to me that you're the type that might enjoy getting it working.
Don't use regular light bulbs, use compact fluorescents.
A Pentium-M wouldn't be a bad choice... even though you'd have to get a laptop for it, they use only 21 watts of power. They're also insanely fast--in some tests they come out ahead of A64s clock-for-clock.
Although you probably want to go with a desktop, in which case a mobile Athlon (45 watts) would be a nice choice.
i was thinking about doing this kind of thing with an xbox.
One solution would be to run Linux on a Microsoft XBox. It's basically a PC with a few minor hardware changes. All that's required is a modchip (try SmartXX or Xenium) to allow the box to executables that have not been "signed" by Microsoft. My XBox runs Xebian which is a Debian distribution. http://www.xbox-linux.org/ They are very cheap now, and you get a box with a DVD drive and 8-10Gb hard disc, ethernet and Pentium III 733Mhz CPU. Mine runs a webserver and stays up for weeks on end. Power consumption is low - I believe it has a 100W power supply.
Ever leave a Dell Latitude cpx running too long with the lid closed?
Friend that worked at Netscape did.. she opened it up and found that the keys had melted. heh.
My main machine at home is an Athlon 800 with 1Gig of RAM and two IDE drives. It uses 100 Watts, that translates to 876kWh per year and at $0.10 per kWh it amount to $88 per year.
I know how much power it uses because I have it connected to a Kill-A-Watt power meter.
Monitor is a big power hog, but your server will not need a monitor to be on all the time.
unless...
she doesn't really care and is just nodding her head to keep you happy.
Laptops are built for low power, its a vital part of making the machines practical. In addition, they have a battery, so you don't need to put it on an UPS.
For a light duty server, laptops are well suited and often overlooked.
I was seeking the same thing before. I did some research and found some really cool and small products. The problem of being cool is it carries a high price tag.
I endup ordered a mini-itx box from idotpc. No hassle, super fast delivery. Cost me around $350 for a 512MB ram 80GB HD system (w/0 CDROM). It ran a small website link above. The best part, my power bill dropped by $10 a month after I turned off the AMD box!!! Now I can brat about helping out in the California energy crisis.
Eventually something should make a webserver the size of iPod. How about $200 for a 40GB version?
Maxtor and Linksys are teaming up to push a device that will enable an external USB hard drive to connect to a wireless router.
Also, this story
Netgear's new WGT634U Wireless Media Router has a little something extra that we expect will be standard on all of these things sooner or later: a USB 2.0 port for attaching an external hard drive that anyone on the network can access. Plus they've cut a deal with Western Digital (sort of like Linksys' arrangement with Maxtor) to hook people up with drives that can used with this thing, though almost any external drive will work (even a lot of those Flash keychain drives) and they've even prepared a list of which ones are compatible.
plenty of these things seem to be out there, check them out.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
that is more power than you think. That is enough to run my house (and I mean house not an apartment) for about 2 to 3 months and that includes the fridge, dishwasher, and occasional use of PowerMac 7300 (yes I have gas water heater and heating). These little things add up more than most people realize, especially when you aren't tracking all your expenses.
These are both excellent, low power consumpsion, single board computers. They will both run FreeBSD without trouble. I know the WRAP is capable of POE; not sure about Soekris machines.
http://www.pcengines.ch/wrap.htm
http://www.soekris.com/
Currently running m0n0wall on a WRAP and FreeBSD on a Mini-ITX. Both run like a dream.
-- Casper Bonk.
These are cool.
http://www.soekris.com/
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
lets pretend you pull out 100 watts all day every day. (unlikely) In Washington DC, that equates to about $0.10 daily, or $36.50/year. Power consumption is only really important for portables.
So, Nick Burns and Rhonda finally tied the knot.
Congratulations!!!
http://www.gumstix.com
K
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Laptops are designed with energy efficiency in mind. In my tests I found that (at least for macintoshes) laptops draw under 40 watts even when running at full tilt, and sip less than 20 watts when relatively idle. You also get a built-in UPS, so you save money and electricity there too. Laptops also don't require a CRT display, saving you another 50 watts or so, plus considerable space savings. If you need additional storage, make sure you get a model with a firewire port on it, or just get one with an 80gb HD if that's enough for you to sprawl on.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
use openwrt for the OS
http://openwrt.org/
and one of these for the hardware
Asus WL-500GX (Speedbooster, 2x USB 2.0)
OpenWRT is amazing stuff. I'm sure you could get it to do everything you are wanting to do.
...procuring a used laptop? Low power, and all the creature comforts of a full-fledged computer.
(aside)
But, I have to also say. I have NEVER even MET a woman who has HEARD of bsd. I had to argue with a Comcast Cable woman today who hadn't even heard of FireWire. I considered it a victory when I got my g/f to run Folding@Home. She was even game for Red Hat, but it was too difficult for her to find a wireless driver for the Thinkpad built-in 802.11... but hey, at least she tried!
Here's to... if not geek, then geek-compatible women! love 'em.
The BriQ is what you need. "The same form-factor as a CD-ROM drive, the briQ provides an advanced, energy efficient (just 20-40 Watts) and affordable solution for embedded solutions. Need an in-dash MP3 player? Need two computers in the space of one? Slide a briQ into the expansion bay of your x86 or Macintosh computer! " It has linux pre-installed.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Pegasos. ;)
OK, it's more expensive than a used Mac, but at least it's not a Mac.
Nothing in the top 30 or so informative/insightful comments mention this so i will:
;)
The VIA epia seems like it might be exactly what you're looking for. Take a look here
They are a very tiny motherboard with a built in VIA CPU. The processing power should be ample for any small server tasks, plus its a tiny and very quiet computer which takes almost no power. Just add ram, a hard drive, a case, and a switch and you're ready to network
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I saw a presentation on these last week, and was blown away. We're talking basically complete system with a 400 Mhz processor (~700 bogomips) the size of a stick of gum. Shitty floating point, but who cares.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
run extension cords to your neighbors power sockets. you can run all your computers without having to worry about the electricty bill. problem solved.
A system that meets the low power requirements *and* can operate in extended temperature ranges would be nice. I program my home's thermostat to stop heating or cooling when I'm at work (gets to 90F during summer). Running the AC or heater just to keep my home server happy would use a *lot* more juice than the computer itself.
There is such a thing as a geek girl. In our last house, my wife is the one that ran all of the cat5 in the house. In fact, in true geek fashion, she insisted on it - I guess she thought I would mess it up like I did the 120V electrical wiring (sheesh- anyone can make a mistake!)
She has more computers than I do, more gadgets than I do. She gets the palm upgrade first!
And she weighs in at under 120 lbs. (pbbbbt)
ayershome.org/users/eric
I bought a PowerMac G4 Cube a few months ago to do this. Low power, no noise, and everything I needed was there and mostly set up by default. The firewall needs a bit of tugging on, but, well, such is life. The Windows file sharing works wonderfully.
Plus, I can either lock it in the closet or leave it out on my living room table as a conversation piece. ('What's that? It's cute!' 'Oh, that's my web server.')
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
No offense, but what you need to use is something that's meant to handle the job: a real computer. You can build a low cost, quiet, power conservative computer for not that much money. The average computer consumes less than 100 watts of power when performing basic tasks. This review gives you lots of details. So really the power consumption won't be a problem. Keep the number of internal devices low and you won't have much heat build up. Keep the heat low and you can do all sorts of fancy things with sound panels to absorb sound, thus fixing that problem. You sound like a person that really does need a home server, like myself and my servers. You can't go wrong with a real computer. Plus when something breaks (and of course it will) you have warranties to fall back on. You can also hop on newegg or run down to the corner Crap Shack and buy replacement parts. Try doing that with your jerry-rigged WRT54G. ;-)
While I know there are plenty of low power solutions out there, I have yet to find one that fits my requirements.
I am currently running a 333MHz PII based Linux server (uptime 409 days, SuSE 8.2) in my closet. I use it for firewall, email, web, FTP, ssh, NFS, Samba, etc. and it works great. However, I would love to find something with a bit more powerful CPU and something that can run mirrored RAID. While the VIA ITX board looks nice, it only has one PCI slot and one Ethernet port. I'd love to find a mini-ATX motherboard based on the VIA or some other very low power CPU with 2 or more PCI slots or with one PCI slot and on-board RAID and/or gigabit Ethernet. I don't need a blazingly fast CPU, just something fast enough but low power is the key.
This box has been rock solid, as long as I don't try and run Seti@Home on it (410 days ago it caused the CPU to lock up solid every time I tried).
The current CPU can get bogged down a bit with the spam filter and I'd love to move to gigabit (everything else is ready for it) so I can use it to archive MPEG files off of my ReplayTV.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Why don't you get a board with a VIA Eden or C3 processor? They don't draw much power and they don't need much in the way of cooling. Get a small ITX case, install your favorite flavor of Linux or BSD, and your set.
I've seen other suggestions for this, I'll give you my exact configuration. I'm running a DNS, web, mail and firewall services using my setup (off of static IP on ISDN no less, 24/7!)
I use a VIA CL6000 (this is a dual lan motherboard with a 600 MHz fanless "Eden" processor) with slackware, 256MB of memory, and a 40GB laptop hard disk (complete overkill, 8GB would be plenty). Total cost of the system was well under $400. Power consumption is about 25 watts, and the box is completely silent. I omit the optical drive since I just "borrowed" one to do the initial install, everything has been via the network since. Uptime's been great.
I've been tempted by the Soekis stuff as well, but cost wise it looks like it'd be a near wash, maybe just a bit cheaper. The ITX stuff is a "real" PC, so you just fire it up and go, no CF config, console emulation via serial port, etc. (I had previously used a CF card on an earlier VIA server, it works if you make sure you put the right things into a RAM disk first.)
As others have pointed out, a cheap laptop would work, however I found the fact that I wanted firewall service (two E-net ports needed) made things a bit odd, as all the used cheap LTs I had included no network adapters, so it would have been dual PCMCIA or USB ethernet, and it just felt and looked really kludgey when I played with it.
I have a server that just a Pentium 2 333MHZ and it runs an irc server, ftp server, ssh server, and its a print server. It is also plenty of computer for a server, and it probably only draws 20 watts of power.
CRAP!!! I thought that one special geeky woman was still out there, somewhere... And now I find out she's taken.
*grumble*
Logic Zoom SDKs are low power development kits that support Sharp (ARM) and Renesas (SuperH) based microcontrollers.
Because they're for developing embedded products, they're low power and solid state. There's a PCMCIA bus on the kit, so you could probably get a SCSI adapter and run a disk on that. Otherwise, you could use Compact Flash for storage. For that matter, you could use USB. There was some story about a guy who ripped a 5 Gb CF drive out of a Rio mp3 player or something the other day.
Anyway, the site specifies which card engines run Linux (no FreeBSD port that I know of). I've always wanted to give it a try, but I'm busy working on my house all the time.
Good luck!
Disclaimer -- I work for this company.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
I run my mail/dns/http on a machine that was intended to be a PVR system. Its ever going to play quake 3, with a 700Mhz VIA cpu, a 60 watt powersupply, and the harddrive being the only moving part (no fans) its low on the power bill and whisper quiet. I bought a single unit barebones from http://www.gctglobal.com/, threw in a particullarly low noise harddrive, and stuck a 512MB DIMM in there.
Shortly after I bought that (about 2 years ago) I became aware of the very large set of options available using the via cpus and mini-itx motherboard form factor. See http://www.mini-itx.com/, the site is based in the UK, but I've seen many of the components they talk about at Fry's Electronics in California. Most of of these run on about 60 watts, so need no powersupply or cpu fan.
They're tiny (13x13x3 in), you can get them dirt cheap in both Pentium and Alpha flavors (100 - 166Mhz range) and just about any *nix distro will support them.
They're basically the predecessor to the SFF boxen. Just don't lay the Alpha Multia's flat or one of the chips on the underside of the motherboard will overheat and die. But, then again, there are detailed instructions on the NetBSD website on how to use those l33t soldering skills to fix it.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
thou shall not promise heaven to poor nerds!
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Is the only way to do this IMO....
I have the exact same in my closet. VIA-Epia Eden 533 MHz motherboard/cpu/network/vga package, fanless, a bit of RAM, a fluid bearing harddrive, Gentoo Linux... it rocks....
- Barely consumes power ~30W
- It's also almost silent.
- It's very cheap.
It runs Slackware with SSH, FTP, Apache, squid, gShield (iptables based firewall), LineControl (pppd remote control), etc. LineControl is because I am still on 56k, highspeed internet wasn't approved by the counsel (read: gf). So I'm tweaking the hell out of it (squid with big cache, cron jobs for nightly downloads with wget - like the 266 MB XPSP2, etc)
I'm using a couple Mini-ITX systems from Via. I have three different motherboards from them. One system has dual LAN ports and is running IPCOP. Another is an 800Mhz running FreeBSD 5.2 which is my web/file server. And another is a 1Ghz sitting under my TV as an HTPC.
You can pick up an old Cobalt Qube on ebay for around $100.
There are howto's - if you dig - for porting FreeBSD to one of these.
They are about 7.5" cubed and draw very little power. I've got 5 of them around the country and they've been going strong for over 5 years.
Lex Systems makes some nice Mini-ITX systems that might be right up your alley, of you can get past the horrors of their flash-based site. I bought a Light system from them a couple months ago with a fanless C3 533, threw a CF card in and installed Bering uClibc on it. Now I have a silent linux based firewall with an internal ADSL interface with enough oomph to run a few IPSEC tunnels and do some nifty firewall tricks. Best of all, since I installed that firewall and turned off the desktop system I never used the noisiest thing in my apartment is the 3 year old harddrive in my iBook, and with Laptop-mode even that isn't spinning most of the time. Silence is golden!
I've had a fanned 800Mhz C3 Light system running as a 3 port firewall at work for over a year now and it works great. A friend of mine has several of them scattered around town as NAT/DHCP/IPSEC appliances for the different branches of the company he works for. Never had a problem with the systems, only the DSL lines their connected to.
- RustyTaco
They run redhat and are a breese to setup and maintain.
Low power, compact, quiet.
Except for one thing, it needs to be able to reboot itself automatically after a power failure, something I have not seen laptops do for some reason.
Pick up an EE Times, Electronic Design, Circuit Cellar, or some other embedded magazine, and pick up a bunch of those PC-104 or whatever they're called. They're designed for embedded use, which means they'll draw a lot less than a full on PC, yet they come with feature sets that'll blow you away. A lot of these are designed to run Linux and the such, so you oughtn't have any problems running the Beastie on there. The coolest hack is you can install about five of these inside a single standard computer case, so it looks like one PC, but actually has a few inside. I'd like to do this someday, and set up an X desktop that hauls ass cuz the apps all run on different comps, but look like they're all in the same box. I don't understand why these things ain't more widespread already.
I'm using a P75 and a P-Pro 150 for my servers. I've even been considering clocking down the machines since the load is fairly low.
Just don't do this with windows. That machine doubles as my electric heater, and does a lot less.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
If it's purely a firewall box, then just grab an old Pentium box, 2 NICs, and a 1GB hard drive (Even that could probably be shaved down a bit, probably.) Install FreeBSD, Rebuild the kernel to enable IPFW/natd or IPF/IPNAT and you're good to go. I've been using this setup (IPFW) for a few years now, though I'll admit my box is a bit overpowered (475 mHz K6-2), it's the lowest one I had handy.
Or power your laptop with a bike
I saw one of These sexy demons at Linuxworld. I played Quake3 arena in Linux on it!
So despite the fact that it's always on, and lives on top of a desk in my living room, I don't really hear it. Very quiet. I haven't measured the energy use, but I suspect it's not bad. My original plan was just to use it as a firewall/personal server, but since it's plenty adequate for a regular desktop, I use it for that now too--it's nice being able to just check the weather or whatever without waiting for something to boot.
So, anyway, I'm pretty happy with it. Recommended.
--Bruce Fields
retrobox.
I used this site to replace my father-in-law's old 486 with a pentium, cost about $40. Pretty sure the power consumption will be less than a standard p4, but probably not as low as a modified appliance.
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
As for the server I recently built a Biostar 200v XPC (case, mobo, PS and heat sink for $160USD). There's room two 3.5" HDs and a CD drive. While it's hardly a cutting edge machine and will never play Doom 3, for under $500 you can build a nice, compact, quiet home server.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Here's a link: Soekris Engineering
Here's another: an unofficial OpenBSD Sokeris HOWTO
These guys make a small machine that has a fully silent option with the
The boxes are nice and compact, with 2 PCI slots which is useful for adding an extra ethernet or DSL card. Check it out.
On that topic, Traverse also sells one of the few PCI DSL cards who has active Linux and *BSD driver development. It's low form factor, which is nice for this sort of work.
Dude.
You just got married, and you are spending your time setting up a LAN??? When I was just married I had much better things to do. And I'm a geek.
My server is based on a Via 600mhz cyrix chip in an I-810mb running with a laptop HD. The cpu has a large heatsink and no fan. It consumes about 22 watts measured at the wall socket. Yes that little surprised me too. And FreeBSD of course :) My guess is the low power is due an efficient power supply that came bundled with the mini-form factor case its in.
Mini-ITX would be to much fuss for me and price/performance wouldn't be that good either.
;-).
I'd actually use an iBook. There's open source software on the net that lets in run in clamshell mode (cover closed), it's unobstrusive and very small (flat), so you can put it behind a panel or something and comes with it's built in emergency screen and KB
You even can leave OS X on it, since it's a good Unix, and a BSD derivate anyway. Fink (Debian OS X) and Gentoo OS X both are in good shape all you need for your OSS needs. You'll feel right at home. For ~1000$ you won't get a better bang for buck.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I have a home network, and wanted to get a server up but didn't have very much space. Since my server won't get slashdotted any time soon (it's not a web server; just sshd, ftpd and IMAP/SMTP), I decided to use the smallest reasonable server I could find: my IBM Thinkpad.
Yes, it's true: I'm running Debian on my Thinkpad connected to my cable line, and I couldn't be happier. Fast connection, and the computer is definitely fast enough for a server. Talk about mobile servers, eh?
- Code Dark
machines draw less than 100W. Great little machines, quite fast.
Oh well, what the hell...
The comments seemed to lean towards the Soekris and similar GEODE products, and the VIA EPIA.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Boot this in you old laptop http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php
I picked up an HP Vectra running at 133 MHz (a K6 PR 166) with 64 MB RAM, 1.7 G HD, and 3com NIC for $10. I installed ClarkConnect on it and an additional NIC and stuck it behind a dresser with the cable modem. That ran great for about 6 months, then I put an 80 GB drive in. I now run it in just about exactly the same config as you describe. I store all my pics and SHN's on it, run Samba and Apache and it is my home share, webserver, etc. I have nery had any issues with it, and power consumption was not a particular problem.
I also like the Vectra's because the case is somewhat slim (3"? about 3U?). They can be had cheap here: http://www.retrobox.com
This server software is the coolest thing I've ever seen. All configured via web browser, does mail, ftp, webserver.. acts as a router and windows domain controller. Awesome product. Worked right out of the box (burnt cd), configured my dsl first shot, and samba works without tinkering. I think you can get it :here
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
http://transmeta.com/success/desktops/nec/nec_powe rmate_eco.html
http://www.fic.com.tw/product/server/janus.aspx
A soekris 4801 (not the 4501 mentioned in earlier replies) has a 266mhz x86 processor and can be purchased with a case/enclosure with laptop harddrive mounting bracket inside. Its smaller than your average college textbook, runs on a "wall wart" power supply, and has 3 ethernet interfaces. Unfortunatly the morons use frames so here's a link to the front page: http://www.soekris.com/ They also don't have pictures of the case on their website* but people on the mailing list have posted a few iirc. *frames and no pictures and no online ordering.... I swear these guys are practically trying to put themselves out of business
Everyone is just listing what they've tried, because you haven't really said what you are looking for.
What are your concerns? Power, heat, noise, price, performance, x86 compatibility?
If you don't need very performance, want a low power fanless system, with x86 compatibility, and are happy with a CF card or 2.5" hard drive (more expensive, less reliable than a 3.5") then Soekris is the way to go. Expect 15watts.
If you're willing to part with x86 compatibility, you must get something Geode-based. They are amazingly low power processors, and come with multiple NICs built-in like the Soekris above. Expect < 10watts
If you want cheap, just grab an old PC, and underclock it. I use this method myself. People think "noisy", but spending $10 to replace the cheap fans will do wonders (Great source). Expect 30watts.
I hate hearing so many people suggesting VIA C3-based systems. They are expensive, slow, and not all that low power. I wouldn't recomend VIA at all.
If you want a system with some real CPU power, you can have it. Buy a cheap AMD Duron CPU, with a KT133 chipset mobo. Now, this would normally use a good 80+ watts of power, but fvcool works well on this chipset. Install fvcool, and power usage will halve when idle, yet it's full processing power is there when needed. Mobo, CPU, PS, Case, RAM: under $150. Expect 40watts.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Beside the point, Have you any idea how hard it is to find a girl who uses FreeBSD? I know plenty of Linux chicks, but one who uses Unix, she's definately a keeper. Lucky bastard...
OK, i'm not in an apartment, I own a townhouse; but I think your power concerns aren't totally justified.
I run two servers full time at my house. I have a single 2.4 GHz xeon 1u rackmount box, and a 1u Dell Powervault for my storage needs (P4 2.6 Ghz).
I had them disconnected for one month while I used them on a work-site and I found my electric bill was only about $8.00 cheaper! I drink more than that in beer on a Friday night.
The electricity cost isn't horrible, but the space, heat, and fan noise are other factors that might make my setup intolerable in your environment.
-ted
If you don't want something like the Soekris routers (very small with little expansion), look at Via's mini-itx computers. You can (or at least could) get a fanless computer with an external DC power supply that supported a CD and hard drive. I'm using one right now as a firewall/VPN/DNS server to connect to a different computer, and it runs very well (though I don't use a hard drive, instead I use a CF card mounted as read-only). The newer ones support up to two extra PCI cards and are really nice.
If you take the display off, it'll probably stay cooler, though it's more likely to have something bang into the keyboard. If that's not a problem, you're probably better taking it off. Also, if it's cooler, it's more likely not to run the fan.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you go for the models mit no more than 667MHz, you get passive cooling. You can get these with up to 2 network interfaces, but one is cheaper and you can put a cheap additional card in the PCI-slot. Just make sure the case you get has a raiser-card. Using a notebook HDD is simpler than CF, since you do not need to worry about writes (CF has a limited number of writes before it breaks). Is also cheaper when you want storage in the GB range. I have made good experience with notebook HDDs from Fujitsu. Very quiet.
Total equipment:
- board
- RAM
- HDD
- Case
The PSU comes with the case. Mine has an external notebook type 12V only PSU and an additional regulator board in the case. What you get is a modern PC that is a little slow (I would say C3-MHz / 2 = Athlon MHz. i.e. a 800MHz C3 feels like a 400MHz Athlon) but completely functional and with everything integrated you are likely to need. Keyboard and monitor required for installation in addition.
I have such a setup running wit a real HDD (also backups on it) for over a year now without problems.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
caseoutlet.com
They have some nice mini-ITX machines.
Yes, they're lovely boxes. But you could get a used laptop for $100-200 with a dead screen that will work about as well with fairly low power.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I had a very similar issue and my fix ended up being 100% geek.
File Server: Nokia IP330 firewall. Bought it for 50 bucks with a dead harddrive. Just a 1U box with an AMD K6-2 and 64 meg of RAM. This box sucks the most power of all my servers, but I needed the extra umph to run linux software raid.
Firewall: WRT54G with the sveasoft firmware. Works like a charm and even supports 802.1q tagging on the wired side (with a little work)
Mail Server: This is the fun one. NeoStation 3000 X Station. 233mhz Geode processor (30 bucks on ebay), very low power and low noise. Put the board in a case from an Intel iPivot (50 bucks on ebay) and we're good to go
The whole thing is sitting in a rack I made out of 2x4s and powered by a Clary Onguard UPS (50 bucks on ebay). The only real power hog I have is my switch, it's an old Bay (you guessed it, 50 bucks on ebay). This can be done in a real fun, and cheap, way. Just look for used equipment and remember, darn near everything will run linux or NetBSD.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
Cute startup/reboot sound, put the IndyCam on for more physical security, you get IRIX. If security is a concern, get a SGI support contract or buy Trusted IRIX.
Seriously, its a fun machine. But i'm not so sure on the power usage. For a second NIC, get yourself a Phobos G130 (i sell one btw).
Indigo2's probably work too, but those need a Phobos G160 or 3C597. I'm not so sure on the power usage either.
A R4x00 Indy might be a bit too slow, but a Indigo2 R4x00 or Indy R5000 most certainly suffices your needs.
Both machines come with a 10 mbit onboard NIC. The Phobos NICs are 100 mbit though saturate usually not at full speed (EISA...). That's good for a firewall/server since you won't use more than 10 mbit whereas you can still use it for file server purposes.
They run Linux too (e.g. Debian), NetBSD. However i'm not sure if the NICs actually will work (the Phobos ones). If you want a serious server you could even buy yourself a faster SGI. They're not that expensive 2nd hand anymore, but power usage really is a concern...
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
Pick one up on ebay for about $150. Easy config, quiet (I put little variable resistors on the itty-bitty fans, so its even quieter, and doesn't get too hot), low power consumption. Has two ethernet ports (could firewall/dmz) and a serial port if all goes to hell. Built in software isn't too bad either...
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
Looks like the 4801 has usb, too (though only usb 1.1, which at 12 mbps is a little slow as a file server). A large drive with a usb enclosure is probably a lot cheaper than an equivalent laptop drive, though it would be slower and draw more power.
Another option might be to use one of those ethernet drive enclosures. If they don't already export smb and/or nfs (I've just seen them at Fry's, I don't really know what they do or how they work, or if multiple computers can access them concurrently) and they work with linux/bsd, you could mount one from the soekris box and re-export the file system through samba and nfs.
-jim
I don't know about you guys, but I have a closet full of working older machines that I just can't seem to bring myself to throw out. My home firewall is a 486/100 ram running the ipcop firewall distro, which I've found to be very stable and powerful. It's also very quiet, since there's no fan on the cpu. I imagine a Linksys would use less power, but the 486 was free and it would take a long time in power savings to make up for the difference in cost.
Obviously a 486 isn't going to cut it for something like a MythTV box, but there are a lot of good barebones mini-itx machines out there that can be put together for not much money.
I've used PC-based stuff and linux for a long time and see no reason to change. It's just a matter of matching the hardware and linux version to the task at hand.
Buy a cheap new i-Mac. Tweak the power settings to maximum entergy savings. Max OS X will run run run... just works... ok, and it is a kick ass MAIN comp too...
why not getting a virtual server (linode, rimuhosting) and running a dlink firewall ? wouldn't it be much more reliable than a computer plugged to a cable connection ?
I have had great success with the VIA EPIA line of single board computers. They are plenty fast enough for the vast majority of todays computing needs, even servers. Firewall, mail server, file server, you name it. For the home or small or even medium sized office these things are great. I have some from Solar PC. They are serving as cheap and simple workstations for word processing and web browsing as well as firewalls and virus/spam filter appliances.
I think this little machine is pretty cool.
www.mini-box.com/m100.htm
I've been tempted to buy one since my web/mail server died recently.
You can do this reasonably. You should have all of your stuff backed up regardless of where you put it. Email and file serving are not security problems, especially if file service is done through ssh. While it may be better to port forward to other computers to share the load and risk, the low effort and low power solution is to set up one box on your internet connection and run that but nothing else 24/7. I set up a 90MHz pentium with sarge and a 200 GB hard drive as my cable box the other day and I love it. If my ISP did not block ports, that box would be a mail server too. It was very easy.
I run about five computers 24/7 and never noticed much on my power bill. None of them are big monsters and all of them run APM or ACPI.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 8/18/031228&tid=222&tid=198&tid=156&ti d=1 covers a LinkSys storage server for external USB2 hard drives. Very hackable....
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
I have a co worker who picked up an apple cube for cheap on ebay, it fits on top of his UPS and serves files to his apartment. He runs OS X but it ought to run netBSD and I think OpenBSD just fine. Notable lack of second ethernet interface requires a router/switch in addition to the cube but it might work for you.
I bought a cute little, very compact A-Open Micro-ATX desktop case with 200w power supply, a BioStar socket-370 mobo, and a new 80GB hard drive and used a Celeron 1.0GHz "Tualatin" processor, 512MB PC-133 memory and an extra network card scrounged from a parts pile for free and ended up with less than $150 in an almost totally silent machine running SuSE Linux for my home webserver, emailserver, dns server, firewall/NATbox, internal fileserver. The CPU uses a big passively-cooled aluminum heatsink I scrounged from an old machine too, so the only fan is the one inside the power supply and it pulls plenty enough air over the CPU heatsink to keep it cool for a home server. It's been running 24x7 for over a year and a half without problems. The only times it was really "down" was when I upgraded from SuSE 8.2 to 9.0 and did a complete reformat/re-install and one other time when a bad thunderstorm took down the entire neighborhood's power lines for half a day and my UPS could only run it for about 2 hours.
Build your own box, you can do it small, cheap and quiet, and Linux will give you all the powerful server features you need... just requires an investment in learning it.
I recently set up an openBrick - very happy with it - low power, quiet, small, designed to be up 24/7 -- I got this to replace a PowerBook Lombaard that was able to go about 9 months of 24/7 before it gave up the ghost in the machine -- Laptops are not really meant to be run constantly - these bricks are - I expect this guy to last for a few years at least - not really the fastest processor, but for mail/spam filtereing, its perfect. -- and mazzel tov..does she have a sister?
Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds demand.
How about a Cobalt Qube. You can find 'em pretty cheap on Ebay. Dead quiet too, one small fan and a hard drive. Takes all of about a minute to setup as well.
how 'bout I give you the finger....and you give me my phone call.
I bought this silent computer. It's so nice to have a silent family room.
The machine has lived up to the expectations. However, here are some caveats:
Marko
The nice thing about the P2-233 is that it seems to be able to run fine with only the heat sink, I've unplugged the CPU fan. I also put the HD, 40G 5400 rpm Seagate, into a SilentDrive enclosure. I also bought a decent and quiet Antec power supply at the time. This system has been reliable and whisper quiet for about 3 years.
.
IBM tried the same strategy when it introduced MicroChannel architecture (MCA) for PS/2 in 1987.
MCA featured technical improvements that were appropriate for the times. Computers were speeding up and the bus was a bottleneck.
The verdict of history?
Although MCA was a huge improvement over ISA, it was limited only to IBM hardware. It was not compatible with either EISA or XT bus architecture so older cards cannot be used with it. This small market made for very high prices, and IBM didn't help matters by charging high licensing fees. MCA was largely ignored, and with the introduction of PCI, MCA swiftly disappeared.
M0n0wall Is BSD, albeit of the Free variety, and it was more or less designed for one of these things.
You can make a normal computer run with less heat/power by picking your CPU right and fiddling with it. A good choice from the mainstream people is the P3 Coppermine, the one on the .18 micron process. It is good at being a server per mhz and quite efficient as well as cheap. So pick up like a 700-800mhz one that runs on the 100mhz bus. Then, take the bus and drop it to 66mhz. You now have a processor in the 500mhz range, plenty for what you are talking about. However the underclocking is going to make it run REALLY cool.
Do that, put in a conservative amount of RAM (like 256MB, not 1GB), a fluid bearing 5400rmp HD, and a low power graphics card like an ATI RAge XL and I bet you are under 50 watts.
Just an FYI on Linksys. While the WRT45G is a fabulous router (I have one myself), do not buy the linksys 802.11G cards that they tend to sell along side it. They have a broadcom chipset which does not have native drivers available for linux/bsd. While you can use ndiswrapper (in linux at least, I'm not familiar with BSD) to make it work... I'd prefer a native solution, that and I've never managed to make ndiswrapper work.
There are several Linux options for a WRT54G. Check out LinksysInfo.org. Some include the WonderShaper for prioritizing traffic like VOIP and game packets.
How about an Axentra Net-Box?
Once you decide to set up a mail server, you'll probably want to add spam and virus scanning. Both are CPU- and memory-intensive. A consumer router probably won't have the horsepower for that. (I'm using MIMEDefang (a sendmail milter), SpamAssassin, and ClamAV on my box.
My file server is a P3/650 with 4x120-gig hard drives, and it draws about 85 watts under load.
I have a dual Pentium 133 (yes, dual-CPUs!) with 96 megs of RAM that I picked up a few years ago for $40. I've been using it as my router with Coyote Linux, and always thought it was probably sucking down the power. I measured the power draw at the wall yesterday while downloading a couple of bit torrents, it was only 47 watts.
Of course, if you were to pick up one of those Epia/Eden/C3 systems, the entire package can consume as little as 20 watts. Maybe 25 or so with a second hard drive.
There's always the possibility of underclocking and undervolting a processor (a mobile Athlon would make a *perfect* candidate), but those tiny Via systems still take less power, and are sexy to boot.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I don't think you really need to worry about a big spike in your electricity bill if you have a normal computer running 24/7...
If you take a look at your electricity bill you will see the cost of electricity as kilowatt hours which is 1000 watts used for an hour. This price tends to be around 15-20 cents.
A typical computer which could run what you are looking to run would need, at most, a 300 watt powersupply (assuming you would use this for anything outside of a server).
More likely than not the average amount of wattage it would require would be even a lot less than that.
Assuming it uses an average of 100 watts (a liberal estimate) it would use 2.4 kilowatt hours a day which would cost, at most 40 cents per day or $12/month in electricity costs. Please keep in mind that my assumptions were very liberal regarding the kilowatt cost and the average wattage draw.
Good luck
I have a soekris net4501, it uses less than 10watts, and provides most of the services for my house.
with a laptop drive attached, you could get a soekris net4801, and power the thing for around 15watts.
The other great option is to use an old laptop, laptops in general use less than 50 watts when operating.. even less with the LCD turned off.
My thinkpad T21 uses 20 watts with the lid closed, and the disk spinning.
URL: http://www.soekris.com
just use a regular computer. your Air conditioner, heater, clothes dryer, refrigerator will all use more power. if you want quiet, just get an apple.
PS2 is damn cheap nowadays(~$200). Buy a official linux kit from sony(~$100) you get a 40G HDD, 10/100 network card, keyboard, mouse, vga cable and the linux discs(redhat based).
I own one of this myself. It is small, cool and silent. You can use them for any task you can expect from a standard x86 linux.
Btw, it can run netbsd and other exotic OSes as well.
Just started investigating the same thing myself. My oldest firewall machine *A 6x86-p120+ with 32mb of Ram* just gave up the ghost, Was a great machine really as both the cpu and psu fan gave up over 2 years ago and it never missed a beat. Anyways. This is an informative read to help gather info on all the products that ARE out there.
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
Put together some old parts...P1, P2 kinda things....around 200Mhz or so. Add a hard disk (doesn't need any real large size), couple network cards, 64MB RAM or so....and a FreeBSD firewall with WebGUI. I'm running a firewall/router with a P3 500 one a 150W power supply, and it probably needs even less than that. Also using the wonderful m0n0wall http://m0n0.ch/wall distro with an awesome webgui!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Quadra cost me 25 bux. if you want a macintosh solution it's awesome. has 3 massive drives, and has been running 2+ years with only 3 restarts. I serve 7 machines in my house.
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
"I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network ... we're now ... We'd like ... we own ... we don't want ... our needs ... our ideal ... We're both ... our ..."
lol!
Translation:
I just got married; I no longer do, like, own, want, need or imagine anything myself. Please help.
This is almost always a setting somewhere, either in windows or the bios. Or, you can always remove the little button that turns it off when the lid closes. Shouldn't be too hard.
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
They're cheap, run on Linux and have already been hacked....
Try a used el-cheapo bookpc. Get one with a pci riser card so you can put a second network card in it. They're small and relatively easy to work on, and the one I had (i810 based) ran linux just fine. You should be able to find one really cheap on ebay or new/refurbished at a retailer. They take full sized hard drives and cdrom drives, but are still very small.
-They are cheap (they often sell for less than $15.00 each on ebay, I even bought a fully functional complete one for $1.00).
-They have a small footprint in terms of space and power consumption.
-They have 64-bit RISC (mips) processors and lots of slots for cheap and easily upgradable RAM.
-Debian is easy to install if you don't wanna fool with IRIX
-They were made to be desktop graphics workstations, so they were built to physically withstand an old large heavy monitor being placed on top of them, thus they are stackable with all kinds of crap on top of them, and no rack mounts are necessary.
-When they were new, they cost tens of thousands of bucks each, so the physical quality and duribility exceeds that of any x86 system.
-Its |337 to turn 15 year old technology into something powerfull enough to compete with a modern system, and do it for less money than a new machine.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I'd suggest looking for a g4 cube on ebay or somewhere. There are a few on ebay right now.
Absolute max power usage is 225 watts. A lot less most of the time. Its quiet, its small, and you can stick OSX on it. Comes with pretty much everything you need right there. And it feels a lot like FreeBSD.
I run four of my websites off a 1995 Gateway P75 desktop. I've "overclocked" it to 100MHz (in quotes, because the 1995 P75s were actually rebadged P90s or P100s. Uptime is 120 days thus far, so no problems there!).
It sports 96MB RAM, and three hard drives in a variety of RAID configurations. It sits behind a combination ADSL modem / firewall / router box. Performance is fine for serving dynamic (PHP/MySQL) web content and handling mail for over 240 users.
I haven't measured power consumption, but the CPU runs fanless and cool, so I expect the HDs are by far the most significant. Only two of them are spun up 24/7, the other is my /usr/src filesystem.
It runs yellow dog linux, it's cheap, doesn't use much power, and really small. http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/briQ/
Pick up a cheap old laptop with a couple PCMCIA (aka PC-Card) slots. Grab a pair of old 3COM network adapters (with the dongles so you can run one incoming and one outgoing), and you have a low-power router. A P75 or high-end 486 would be enough to route and do mail for you.
The hardware would set you back no more than around $100-200.
As long as you're not compiling on the little guy, he'll do just fine - I know more than a few people who have run linux and BSDs on 486s as NAT routers for 3mbit cablemodems.
The HushPC ITX is absolutely quiet and low-power, but rather expensive. The new iMac G5 runs a full Unix OS, very low noise, plus you can wall-mount it and use it as its own control panel or as a digital picture frame. It's not really low-power, though.
This is a bog-standard 108Mbps wireless+wired home router, with NAT+firewall. It also has a USB2 port, into which you can plug any USB2 hard disk or memory stick. You can configure the router as a SMB and FTP server to access files on your disk outside the home, with multiple logins and folders. The box gets warm but is completely fanless.
In our old house, we had an IPC rigged up as a doorbell server under the stairs.
/dev/audio.
When the doorbell button was pressed, it would close a couple of serial port pins normally used to signify a failing UPS. This simply execute rc.powerfail (or whatever it was, can't remember now) which in turn cat'ed a sound file to
A small home-built amp provided the sound output.
This was about all the IPC was good for as it was even slower than the IPX!
... and consolidate your network infrastructure on VMware or something similar.
--
Try Nuggets , the mobile search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
Not going to give you much horsepower, but they only draw a few watts at a low voltage.
I've done some contract work on one that was about the equivalent of a P100. Took standard SDRAM simms (or dimms?), on-board flash, most will take a CF card, and provide ethernet and ATA connectors.
I've been thinking a bit about this kind of thing since I'm planning on moving my next house off-grid.
NorhTec has just released a product called the MicroClient. It is a x86 based system small enough to fit in the palm of your hand that sells for less money than a full sized PC. It consumes 4 watts without disk and 7 watts with disk.
Small, good looking (comes in metal grey or black), almost silent, an excellent choice.
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
A good way to recycle a dead laptop that would otherwise be scrap too.
If you didn't also want a file server, I'd say "go for it". There was a time when booting diskless over a 10 megabit (shared) network was condidered just peachy. If all you have on the outside of the firewall is a 1 Megabit adsl/cable link then it'd be more than enough to handle that load.
Unfortunately, if you also want file serving, chances are (these days) that you'd find 12 megabit a bit slow.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
It is actually pretty easy to let a laptop run with it's lid closed: You take a pair of pliers and rip out whatever is used to detect the closed lid. If you want, you can be a little more gentle, but if you have a laptop with dead batteries you can only use as a server any more, you might as well forget about functionality you will never need again.
Any of the Via based PCs should do the necessaries. They're mostly very quiet, with minimum fans in the case, and probably have a decent disk that doesn't make much noise. Via mobos also support CF cards and the like, so you could even make it diskless, if you want.
http://www.hoojum.com/
http://www.hushtechnologies.net/
(and many more besides for you non-europeans)
geez.. it's so obvious how some slashdot articles from people claiming to be innocent and naive are actually from vultures attempting to use the /. for what it's worth.. its about time /. started requiring a background check.. :)
How about to use GMail.com, so it can do a lot of things for you ;-)
I'm a Lost Soul in this Lost World...
A cheaper alternative to the Sokeris is the WRAP by PC Engines. The cheapest one goes for $140 with a 266MHz CPU. For an additional $15 they come with a real neat case. They only use 3 to 5 Watt and support POE. They don't come with an IDE interface though, so if you want to read and write, you will have to invest into a Microdrive. My WRAP is running OpenBSD off a 32MB CF card, working as a router and has been running like a charm.
I just got a Soekris and it's a fine box but yesterday I realised that an Xbox is cheaper, more powerfull and it has a hard drive (but only one NIC). It's bigger and not as quiet as a Soekris but it's probably still better than a standard PC. I don't know about FreeBSD but it can run Linux without hardware modification.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
I had a project many years ago to design a computer for racing yachts, they were using laptops and breaking them on a VERY regular basis, thing is these guys are totally anal about weight, on a 40 foot boat they will chuck shit like 2 pint aluminium kettles over the side, so whatever I designed HAD to use fuck all power because they carried minimal traditional 12 volt lead acid and minimal diesel and in any case starting the motor meant a race penalty.
Ideally they were looking for something around 500 mhz, that weighed 2 ounces, was literally bulletproof and waterproof to 1000 feet, the size of a matchbox, and generated enough power to charge the main lead acid battery.
A smart engineer doesn't try to reinvent the wheel (especially for a *potential* customer that isn'y waving a blank cheque book at you) so I went out and bought a 3.5 inch biscuit PC from advantech (do a google) this is a single board PC, literally the size and form factor of a 3.5 inch hard drive, with onboard cyrix 233 mhz cpu, onboard sodimm slot (I used a 68 mb card), onboard gfx and sound, and pc104 expansion (I used 4 of these, one for four rs232/485 ports, one for a gps, one for pcmcia and one for ethernet) I also used a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive, and stuck the whole thing in a case that had an integrated inverter / PSU that would run off anything from 10 volts dc to about 36 volts dc. The whole thing was completely fanless.
Build quality of all these components, being industrial, was excellent, much better than home pc standards. It was also extremely tough and had a very wide enviornmental envelope. Best of all it was cheap, they make so many of these things for point of sale electronics etc that prices are comparable to cheap domestic kit.
For the demo unit (which was fully linux compatible) we ran winders98 to demo the nav software which was also winders based, performance was about what you'd expect from a equivalent mhz laptop, eg more than enough for 95% of uses.
Nearly forgot, being industrial it also had in hardware an automatic reboot thing (which you could disable) which would reboot the whole thing if the OS stopped responding to an internal irq for 15 seconds...
Power consumption of this box was typically 11 watts mean, this was measured by a pukka power meter on the supply line for several hours.
Apart from the 2.5 inch hard disk, it was zero moving parts and therefore near as dammit totally silent too.
My take on this is if a standard obsolete dektop box won't do it look at EPIA, and if EPIA won't do it then look at industrial biscuit PC's.
HTH etc
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Main attractions for your application:
-It is small (17x17cm)
-has decent horsepower at 1 GHz, considering dimensions and power consumption
-has loads of I/O interfaces, that can be put to good use (for example, USB ports for ISDN or analog modem or for printers- good use for printer server!)
-is very low power. IIRC it uses 20W peak, less on average. Less power means less ventilation needs, less ventilators, less hasle with oxidation and dust buildup, less noise.
-two builtin Ethernets let you use it as a firewall. If you plug in one more into a free PCI slot, you can skip the ethernet switch, that is, if yo have up to two machines to connect to the switch. Other possibility would be to plug in a WiFi card and cover the premises with wireless also (usefull if you have notebooks etc.)
- it has two IDE channels, which means that you can connect four disks to it (like two RAID-1 arrays). Very usefull for local noncritical data that you need to/might want to use from all your local machines.
-without loads of troubles, energy inefficiency (UPS), or costs, it can be battery powered.
-it has builtin AC97 soundcard and can be used for sound and video player (dvd, divx etc)
-it fits inside standard ATX housing and connects to the standard ATX power supply
-it is relatively abundant and not very expensive.
Here in SLovenia I can get new CL for some $180 +VAT. Not cheap, but not that expensive, considering that everything else is built-in.
Essentially, you need just a power supply, DDR RAM stick and disk.
AFAIK, none of the other proposed solutions can offer all this.
OTOH, if price seems to steep for EPIA or you would like to reuse something that you already have, that's another matter.
You could *underclock* old Athlon or Tualatin to get it to run cooler, fit all PCI slots with Ethernet cards and/or cheap IDE cards and use it as a switch/firewall, small data storage point, WiFI acces point, printer server, fax machine etc etc etc.
Meshcubes
I have a slightly modified Procase with a fanless VIA EPIA board in it. It does just that. Firewall/Mail/File-server (it used to do jukeboxing too). With a 80mm Papst fan running on 7V (the harddrive generates some heat that must be sucked out of the box) it is quiet as a whisper and draws less current than an average light bulb.
From what I've read BSDs should run just fine on that hardware too.
$0.047/kWh.
So my old pentium with a ~300W power supply can draw a max of 0.3kW *24h *30.5d/mo = 219kWh.
Which is about $10, assuming the power supply is maxed out. Which it isn't (I never use the CD/floppy drive) Spin down the hard drive etc.
My wife and I actually keep all 3 computers up all the time (turn off the monitor).
The few dollars a month is worth it to keep from having to wait to turn them on and get back to where we were earlier.
I use Clark Connect on a 350MHz Pentium. Does everything and sets in a closet humming away. http://www.clarkconnect.org/projects/home.php Worth looking at even if you are a guru IMHO.
I am surprised that no one has suggested this before, but get a Tibook from eBay, preferably with an Airport card installed.
/dev/null !! :)
- It's got a BSD derivative OS
- Works without problems (FreeBSD drivers for some laptops... good luck!)
- The PowerPC architecture is more energy efficient than 80x86
- The 667 Mhz/DVI model, the one I am typing this with, is silent in normal use.
- No need for additional wireless routers/access points
- and you can send all you unix boxes to
http://grotto11.com/blog/archive/1018823985.shtml
The Alpha-based multia is hot hot hot, but the Alpha-based on isn't the only option, DEC made an Intel-based one as well.
The intel-based Multia is small, quiet, low power, and runs FreeBSD perfectly. I've been using them as thin servers for years. It's only a P100, but for a mail/news/file server that's ample.
He's only using it for a firewall, right?
And the network cards themselves have their
own on-board processors.
40 Meg will be fine. If he is
doing anything else he will not be using this
low-power device.
These were designed to draw little power. Even if its battery life is not great, you'll still be able to move it from one room to another without shutdown and the UPS will be built-in.
Being an x86 machine, it will run our favorite OS smoothly too.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
all vmware ;)
Walmart is selling $600 USD laptops that look like they'd make excellent Linux boxes. The only god damn bad thing with them is they are coming with a copy of Windows Home.
Christ, they could sell them for the exact same price, minus the Windows License, and I'd be telling every bastard I know to buy one. I wish I didn't have to many damn computers around me right now, because I WANT ONE.
You need to stuff a 512MB stick in there (~$90 from pricewatch), but they're still a good buy.
---
AMD Athlon XP-M 1600+ processor with PowerNow! technology
128 MB RAM, upgradeable to 640 MB*
40 GB ATA 100/66/33 hard drive
Supports 2.5V / 1.25V 200pin DDR200 / DDR266 SO-DIMM module
14.1" XGA TFT LCD with 1024 x 768 resolution
16.7 million colors possible
High performance 256-bit 3D graphic engine
Shared memory 16/32/64 MB DDR (user adjustable in BIOS)
DVD-ROM drive
Two built-in stereo speakers
Integrated WiFi-compliant Wireless 802.11b (11 Mbps) LAN
On-board 1Gb/100M/10M Base-T LAN Ethernet, up to 1 Gbps
56 K V.90 modem
Synaptics touchpad w/ 4-way scrolling button
4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 RJ-11 modem jack, 1 RJ-45 Ethernet jack
Line-out Headphone jack
1 microphone-in
1 external VGA port, 1 parallel port, 1 S-Video TV - Out connector
1 DC-in jack for AC adaptor
Universal AC adapter with auto-sensing dual voltage support. AC 100-240V
BIOS plug & play, ACPI and DMI
Kensington lock and BIOS password protection
4-cell Li-Ion battery pack
Pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Dimensions & Weight: 13"W x 10.75"D x 1.5"T; weighs 6 pounds
Maybe Macs are different but I've never known anyone to lose data due to a hard drive flaking out. I've got almost 4 years on my PBG4 400 and it never gets shut down.
I built a NAT/Firewall box from an old pentium 2,
66 mhz, with 64 meg of RAM. It only has that
much RAM because I scrounged it from other boxes.
It has no hard disk, the linux distro and software
boot from a 3.5 inch floppy disk. I get very fast
download speeds through it and it firewalls nicely
http://www.freesco.org
I took another p2 133 mhz box and put gentoo linux and samba on it. I added a cheap hard disk and
made it into a file server box for my wife and
I. We have our mp3's on it.
None of these actually cost me any cash. They
were all replaced by newer boxes or given to me.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
You want a mini-ITX machine http://www.mini-itx.com/ Or any of the boards from here: http://www.soekris.com/ which can hold a flash card (for ultra-low power/noise/heat) which are now 256-1024MB for cheap. Otherwise, they can hold a hard drive. Also, see http://m0n0.ch/wall/ to save yourself some time in building that router.... fine product.
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
There are stacks of small personal SAN devices on the marked in Japan that are being hacked in various ways.
Run http://agora.spymac.net/ through babelfish.altavista.com (japanese -> english translation).
It contains a zip file with a debian image and instruction on how to install on a buffalo linkstation.
The kernel is a problem though. Thats in flash on the box and a bit HW specific, so not so easy to update, the rest of the OS is pretty open after that.
There is a 200MHZ PPC in the linkstation and it uses just over 20W.
You can hack them to allow USB 2.0 support, install your own apps cross compiled for MIPS, etc.
And, if you are carefull about it, you could still use it as a TiVo.
Sure, get a Mini-ITX system in a small bookshelf enclosure. Some of those boards have dual-Ethernet connections on the back, so configuring it to be a Linux firewall should be no problem assuming you can get Ethernet drivers.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This might be what you are looking for, its inexpensive, low energy and small. http://www.solarpc.com/ the least expensive one is around $200.
This makes one wonder why AMD and Intel don't offer speed throttling on *all* their CPUs. I'm sure it's just because it gives them a reason to charge a premium. Someone should shame them into offering it in all CPUs because of the environmental impact. We're not talking about a 10% decrease in power consumption. More like 300%. In addition, in colos, server rooms, and even my bedroom(!) power is not only consumed uselessly by idle CPUs, but also by the air conditioning for the room. Generate heat, then get rid of it, for no reason.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
Here's what I wish I could afford on my paltry network administrator pay:
...
VIA EPIA800V kit, with fanless VIA Eden processor, PW-60 DC-DC converter, 12V/5A AC power adapter. Price I found $148. If you got the extra $$ then you can do better than this kit, including dual Ethernet on board.
PCI riser, $10.
An IDE to CF adapter. Prices I found are around $20.
A 128M CF Flash Drive (I probably wouldn't need that much, but I'd rather have more than less) Price around $30.
Spare PC133 Ram. I could probably do with 32M to 64M, although I've got enough 64M sticks that are pretty much useless to me for any other purpose.
Spare NIC. You can get plenty of RTL-8139 based cards dirt cheap $5 - $10. I've got plenty of NIC's in my little spare parts box, that I would use.
An afordable Mini-ITX case for this kit. Unfortunately for me, I haven't found low cost cases worth using that weren't more expensive than the EPIA800V kit. I may just pick up a cheap project box, and modify it to my own needs, that is if I can ever find a way to spare a little over $200 for my little dream project. It's hard enough to just put food on the table.
From there the choices on Free (Libra) are yours. Me I want to do sort of a LFS, but more geared to embedded systems. Use a Linux kernel configured specifically for my needs (mainly firewall), but lean and mean, uCLibc, BusyBox,...
Here's my reasons for my choices. No moving parts to break and fail, pretty much solid state, low power, low heat. This also gives me x86 compatible architecture, and all the gear I need to build a specialized router/firewall.
Actually, I would like to do two kits, because what I'm really interested in is High Availability (LVS-HA using VRRPv2). One box dies the next automatically takes over, this is why I want to build the system from scratch and not just use another specialized distro geared toward router/firewalls like Devil-Linux, Leaf Bearing, FloppyFW,
Why do I want to do this... PHBs. My PHB wanted a training room set up, firewalled from the rest of the network. So he bought a cheapo Linksys, which is fine, but what bowled me over was when the Linksys broke. I put together a box from all the ancient pieces of junk scattered around our storage room, installed Linux, and wrote specific rulesets to do exactly what we needed (which by the way the Linksys couldn't do), spent maybe 3 hours doing this, had it ready to go.... and the PHB said "no", his stated reasons: hardware failure possiblities... What I believe the real reason was is this: My organization is soooo hooked on the Microsoft monoculture that they drool over idea of a Windows only world (they also drool over replacing their VAX, AXP, and IBM super boxes with a Windows Server Cluster!?!). You only have to look at their web apps to see the monoculture mentality at that organization,... they only work with IE. At first, I thought about remastering a Knoppix based distro for this use, or using LEAF Bearing on a floppy, or Devil Linux CD and configuration floppy, then building several spare boxen as backup, but I realized that this wouldn't impress them (the dark side of the force is strong with my PHBs...). The answer to why I want to do this is: I want to build a proof of concept, shatter their arguments with dual solid state boxen set-up with seamless fail-over, the ability to customize the rulesets, manage the firewall from a management PC (FirewallBuilder, and SSH using RSA keys and no clear text passwords), and let them stew over how much they would have to spend to get the same functionality from a commercial firewall. I would like to show this off, then take the boxen home, and replace my home Athlon based firewall, happy in the thought that I provided some education to my PHBs and fellow (Windows only) network admins.
The box or systems your looking for is Linux SBSP (Linux Small Business Server Platform) This will do all that your looking for and more. It will also run on your older equipment, IE .. P-III , 512Megg Ram and 10-20 Gig HDD and 2 Nic Cards.
Email mail me and I'll send you a free 30 day server download, if you like it and want to keep using it, just sign up for the monthly monitoring fee of $39.95 and you get Email Spam, Anti-Virus filtering, Server system Monitoring, VPN, Firewall, Web, Webmail(with shareable Calendar) Print & File Server, plus many other features.
Check it out http://www.linuxsbsp.com/
There is one thing to beware of with the mini-itx boards and cases. I bought a Checkercube case for my mini-itx Eden board (533MHz) and the included power supply was so weak that when I tried to use a modern high speed cdrom (say a 48x or 52x speed) to do the install of the os, I got unpredictable behavior. I think what happened was the cdrom was lowering the rail voltage so much at 12v that the board was crashing. I bought a antec 300W supply at ComaUSA and it's worked fine for the install and running. Unfortunately, 99.99% of the time I don't even need the cdrom or the higher power supply and this Antec PS can't even go in the checkercube case. Mark
My main Internet server is a 400MHz iMac DV running Mac OS X 10.3.x, the Cyrus IMAP server, Sendmail (10.3 has Postfix by default, not Sendmail), SquirrelMail, etc, etc.
The iMac DV's with their FireWire ports, are ideal little server boxes and very easy to support. The truly paranoid can run OpenBSD on them, and the Linux fanatics can join in the fun, too.
Right now, the server is off-site, and I manage it mostly with ssh and the occasional VNC session, but soon it will be moved back to my house now that I have a 3072/768 ADSL line installed with a slash-29 subnet.
Once the monitor goes into sleep mode, the whole machine doesn't consume a lot of power. The best part is, I got the machine for free from a client!
I'd also look into getting a Sun/Cobalt Qube. I just rebuilt one for a client, and it's a rockin' little box--I believe Sun is committed to support for them until 2008.
There is no contest, you need a VIA EPIA, running at 533 or 800mhz, which may not sound like a lot, but it is perfectly acceptable for a home server, and more powerful than the soekris or other kits you'll hear of. You can get higher grunt power if you want, but it'll be an overkill.
If you buy a pre-build kit from mini-itx (www.mini-itx.com), it's all you need: comes in a DVD/VCR size box, has a CD-ROM, HD, etc with a single PCI slot that easily fits an 802.11 card, and you can just plug a USB DSL modem into the back, and a hub into the 100mb LAN port - plug a printer into the parallel or USB port, and it's also your print server. Run an entire home network kit (samba, etc) easily. How do I know? Because I did this for over a year.
In terms of cost, power consumption is fantastic: the power supply for the mini-itx is only 70W max to start with, and typically your box will idle at low CPU and with drive inactive, it reportedly draws no more than 5-7W idle power -try doing that with a full scale PC.
It does have a case-fan, but I've found that you can disable the case-fan without a problem -- meaning you get totally quiet operation. Did I mention that is only the size of a VCR/etc, so can in a cupboard or out-of-the way.
Seriously, anything else is an overkill on all fronts. We previously used ours in a small apartment, serving a 2.8ghz dell desktop and a couple of wireless laptops, all at 1mbs DSL 24/7. Absolutely fantastic.
You can either buy a pre-built kit, or a pre-build (where you need to plug everything together -- you'd have to be reasonably incompetent if you couldn't do this).
- IBM ThinkPad T20 Laptop
- 7w standby
- 145w peak (115w peak w. no scsi)
- 105w idle (both 10K scsi)
- 96w idle (only 1 10K scsi)
- 91w idle (no scsi drives)
btw, anyone notice how hard it is to get actual specs. for devices these days? The datasheets for most drives have turned into just glossies - maxtor is one of the worst.- 15w display off, disk on.
- 25w all on, battery not charging.
- 15w average (Total for 120 hours == 1.81 kw/h)
Sony STR-DE995 Receiver- 0w standby
- 48w vol @ 20, using tuner.
Shuttle SS51 mini-pc p4-2.4ghz, 5400 rpm disk.- 4-5w standby (4.5?)
- 95-105w peak
- 65-70w idle
Dell PowerEdge 1600sc Server with 2 10K RPM SCSI disks...a typical PC being used as a web/mail/firewall box (P200MMX with 32 Megs of RAM) that is on 24/7 with no GUI will not use more than $5.00/month of electricity where I live. (NE Ohio) You can put console on the serial port to avoid needing a monitor. Unless you are getting seriously raped by your utilities (which is a distinct possibility here) you shouldn't need to worry about having a computer on 24/7. Unless $5.00 a month is a problem?
Un-news
Another similar vendor that I've had good luck with.
(Not that I've had bad luck with the mini-itx site).
plus-good, double-plus-good
Should have read 0x8c9, after this posting, it will be 0x8ca. Sounds like a BSOD error message :-P
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
I ordered one of these for testing, as it looked very intriguing. unfortunately, we have yet to get it to really work well, via wired or wireless connections- it will randomly choke on packets, and has bizarre latency issues that we are at a loss to explain.
we upgraded the firmware (it has it's own nifty firmware update thing on it's web interface) and called netgear, to no avail. It's probably running linux inside, as it wants to reformat your disks to ext2 format (I think, don't quote me though). I was bummed, as I really wanted to hook up and mount my existing fat32 usb drives. all in all I was not particularly impressed.
it would be cool if all the features worked, but as-is it's kind of a half-broken first generation product.
EOM
Me, since the screen went flooey on my old Amity CN, I leave it on 24-7 in a friend's office where there is connectivity. It's been a godsend when I need a place to stash stuff online.
It doesnt attract attention looking like another book on the shelf. But next to it is a big aluminum plate, just to make sure the heat is all dissipated & it doesnt become a fire hazard. I had it on the top shelf on a water-filled cushion, but my friend preferred the aluminum slab.
The thing has no cooling fan to burn out, and is rated 27 Watts max. [P133, 32Mb, 1.2G, W98, VNC] No 75 watt laptop here!
I am geeky, hot AND smart and while lennydotcom likes to recklessly throw around mental illness accusations, sadly it is he who clearly is ill. Who would cheat, lie, destroy and repeatedly leave a HOT, SMART, GEEKY successful (not to mention adoring) wife. ONLY someone who is mentally ill, I fear! So happy to be free and available for new adventures....