Energy Efficient and Cheap Servers for Home Use?

Posted by Cliff on Friday September 17, 2004 @11:20AM from the losing-less-money-down-the-outlet dept.

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?"

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Re:The obvious? by Listen+Up · 2004-09-17 11:41 · Score: 0, Flamebait

That's not true at all. I have an old P233 laptop that I am using as a server and two PCMCIA ethernet cards present no space problems whatsoever. How much space do two external ethernet dongles take up once the PCMCIA cards are in the laptop? Hmmm....let me measure....1" before you bend the cables back along the side of the laptop.