Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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 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 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 ?????
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.
A possible problem with a laptop is fitting two ethernet ports in -- you need two if you're going to use it as a firewall. Older laptops usually don't have built-in ethernet, so you'd need to connect two PCMCIA cards, which might present space difficulties.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I use an old Pentium 100 laptop for this. It's nice having a battery in the server as well.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
...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.
i did it and im very satisfied, i am running debian woody, and using the xbox as a mailserver, webserver, ftp, firewall and proxy
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. ;-)
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.
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
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)
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.
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
Here's a link: Soekris Engineering
Here's another: an unofficial OpenBSD Sokeris HOWTO
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.
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.
.
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.
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
Most Laptops use only 20-40 watts of power and could be used as a simple file/mail server. If the screen can be turned off the power used will be quite a bit less yet. If more storage is needed than an older cheap laptop has internally, an external USB drive should not add too much extra power drain. Some Laptops can sleep using virtually no power at all until network activity wakes it.
All theory is gray
"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.
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
I've build one in a small wine box, together with a 250 GB 3,5 " HDD. The reason for the hard drive is that it doubles as a Media Server for multiple computers. There were some issues with USB boot devices on my board, but I suppose VIA will have those fixed by now.
This runs fine on a 53W external power supply. If you remember that you can spin down the HDD, the power requirements will be pretty low. I can not give you an exact figure, but it booted fine with several devices attached, including a DVD-ROM drive, so it will only use a small portion of the 53W supplied.
Even then it generates a bit of heat (I've, unfortunately, one with an active CPU fan; the fanless parts were out of stock), so make sure it has got some form of ventilation. Otherwise, buy one with fan but put it into somewhere.
CPU speed is fine for a server running either Linux (!) or Windows. Unless you are the pirating kind, for home use a linux solution is preferable. It also comes with more features out of the box for servers.
Other advantages:
- MM support including audio output (digital even)
- put in a relatively big block of memory and run internet/java/whatever servers
- USB 2.0/firewire support (take your MP3's with you, share a printer)
- PCI support for second or third ethernet port
- HW temperature support (S.M.A.R.T. harddisks mostly have a temperature sensor as well!)
- relatively large support, including different kind of cool cases if you don't wanna build your own
http://www.viaembedded.com/indexN.jsp
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.
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).