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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
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/
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 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 ?????
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.
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.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
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
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.
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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.
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.
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. ;-)
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.