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?"

Comments

Soekris is what you want.

[Nugget]

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.

Re:Soekris is what you want.

[douglips]

You can easily run the Pebble Linux distro on these. The easy way is to mount a CF card on a Linux box and build a bootable filesystem there. The Pebble docs walk you through it, piece of cake.

Since you can get 1 GB flash cards for pretty cheap, and Pebble even with added bells & whistles fits handily in 256 MB, you can run dead silent. No fans, no water cooling. Power consumption is somewhere south of 10 watts according to the soekris docs.

Of course, if you are running a mail server and/or web server, you might want an actual hard disk to be able to have many read/write cycles without destroying your CF card - you can use a microdrive CF form factor disk with no problem.

My understanding is that Soekris' support for *BSD is better than for Linux, but I've had no problem running Pebble on mine.

Re:Soekris is what you want.

[blixel]

Soekris boxes are exactly what you're looking for.

I'll second that. I bought one of these about 6 months ago and it has been amazing. I plan on getting at least one more so I can have a highly customizable WAP.

Check my little tutorial for more info. (Several pictures included.)

Is this what you're looking for?

[fatjesus]

http://www.mini-itx.com/

Re:Is this what you're looking for?

[Bombcar]

I'm drawing less than 35 watts with one of those. The harddrive takes most of the power. You won't get less than that, and 35 watts is basically less than a normal lightbulb.

Try to get a setup that requires no fans.

Via Motherboard

[bluewee]

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.

Mini-ITX variety

[captnitro]

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.)

How about a used laptop?

[Darth Muffin]

A used laptop might do what you want. You don't need an awful lot of power. If a laptop HDD is large enough for your storage needs, then look for a cheap used laptop on e-bay.

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).

Re:How about a used laptop?

[Stevyn]

Not a bad idea, but laptops don't like to be left on 24 hours a day. I would know. I have a dell inspiron 8200 and I keep this thing running all the time. I'm also on my third hard drive. I just keep the operating systems and programs on the laptop drive and all other data is on the external firewire drive. If you could get a USB drive that was powered by the laptop, that might be a safer solution.

This is a good power saving alternative to a huge desktop, but I wouldn't trust my data to a laptop hard drive.

Old Laptop, two pcmcia net cards

[Saint Stephen]

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.

Since you like Linksys

[kbahey]

How about the NSLU2?

It has been covered before on Slashdot and is hackable just like the router you mentioned.

Boxes too...

[douglips]

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.

Openbrick

[Scottaroo]

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.

Two Things

[Listen Up]

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.

WRT54GS

[chopkins1]

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.

Re:Obsolyte!

[Spad]

As a concerned Slashdot reader - here's a Coral cache link for the page in question:

SparcStation IPX

Re:Mini ITX and CF

[sPaKr]

memory, daemon, spin up disk, cronjob ? jebus your cool. It only took you about 10 seconds to revinvent a shitty vfs layer in userspace. Shouldnt we just be able to tune the VFS for aggressive cacheing and let that spin up and down the disk as needed. I dont want to get into the softupdates Vs. journel issue, but really thats what you want.

Real computer

[macdaddy]

Don't use a device like a LinkSys or some other device that requires a flash card for storage if you're planning on serving web pages or handling email. Proper handling of email is not simply take the incoming message and write it to disk once. Do you realize that Sendmail writes a transcript file (xf) that exists during the life of a session showing everything that happens during that session? Few people realize that. Spam and AV checking will also likely require at least part of the message to be written to disk prior to scanning. Now you can do a lot of this in memory but the memory in a WRT45G is going to be too limited to have a decent tmpfs partition to handle this.

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. ;-)

DEC Multia's

[Moekandu]

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.

Epia / Mini-ITX

[The_DOD_player]

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.

Re:Epia / Mini-ITX

[merlin_jim]

I'm also a proud Mini-ITX owner. I have the 800 MHz version with a small fan. Got a small 2.5" hard drive used (4 GB). Stick some RAM in there. I put mine in a Cubid 2766 box, which is very compact (it's far smaller in form factor than my VCR) and uses an efficient and quiet 12V DC powersupply; the AC power is rectified outside in a transformer brick that doesn't require active cooling.

Prices (as I recall.... YMMV):

800 Mhz EPIA... $100
128 MB RAM... $40
2.5" 4 GB HDD... $40
16X DVD-ROM drive... $25 (eBay)
mini-adapter for DVD-ROM... $10
Case + DC-DC power supply... $60

for a grand total of... $275. And it can double as a DVD / digital media player.

BTW, I originally modded an acrylic cube to hold the computer. With no prior experience, I built a 7" cube to hold everything. I took it out because the power switches I used were difficult to press. I even used acrylic hinges. You can get just the power supply for $30.

I didn't do it for e-mail though. MythTV baby, so you gotta throw in a $150 hardware capture card to be perfectly fair when quoting the price of my system as-is.

Cobalt Qube

[old_sarge]

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.

Re:Mini ITX and CF

[bobbozzo]

Linux 2.6.6 and above kernels have a "Laptop Mode" which will only spin up the disk when necessary (read needed, or write buffers full).

It's a sysctl variable...
echo "1" > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode

There's apparently also a userspace version if you don't want to upgrade your kernel.
Google has info on using both.