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.
http://www.mini-itx.com/
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.
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...
Flash memory isn't a good storage solution for a mail server. If you've got any sort of traffic volume, you'll wear out the memory in a year or so.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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 ?????
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.
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
Bollocks. Just do what I did - build a nice little Mini-ITX system, put in a gig of RAM and load up Linux with a custom initrd that extracts the system to a ramdisk and pivot_roots to it. Mount the drive for storage, then use hdparm to tell it to power down when idle.
Then write a daemon to watch when the drive is spun up, and copy the mailboxes off to a storage area on the drive. Use rc.local to copy them back when the system reboots.
Voila - low power (max 40 watts, usually less because the drive isn't spinning) and fast.
You could do this with flash as well, you just won't have the storage space of a drive. And it obviously doesn't have to spin down. Just use a cron job.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
...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.
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. ;-)
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.
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.
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).
/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
It's a sysctl variable...
echo "1" >
There's apparently also a userspace version if you don't want to upgrade your kernel.
Google has info on using both.
Nothing to see here; Move along.