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Energy Efficient and Cheap Servers for Home Use?

Posted by Cliff on 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?"

3 of 594 comments (clear)

  1. SparcStation IPX by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:SparcStation IPX by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There's some problems with the IPX that should make you think twice before considering it.

      1) CPU speed: The CPU in a Sparc IPX is slow. We're talking a MicroSPARC at 40MHz. Even running basic applications in a shell, it feels like slogging through mud. I have a SparcStation classic, which uses a MicroSPARC at 50MHz (slightly faster) and it's pure torture, especially when you fire up gcc to compile something.

      2) Bus speed: The 20MHz SBUS can barely support 10Mbps ethernet at full speed. I put an hme 100Mbps adapter in my SparcClassic and couldn't push more than about 12Mbps through it with large packets. It absolutely choked with smaller ones. The system also adds about 4ms of latency to any packet going through it, in my experience. Again, this is the slightly faster SparcClassic, not even an IPX! If you have a really fast (3Mbps or greater) DSL connection, you may lose out on performance because of this.

      Don't get me wrong, it's a fun as hell box to play with, and you can get them to network boot and run off a serial console, but they're just plain torture for doing real work. Even a PCI-bus 486 is loads faster.

      -Z

  2. Old Laptop (aka a "california server") by nweaver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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"?

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