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Low-Powered Personal Servers?
antifoidulus asks: "Being the proud owner of a PowerBook, I have but one complaint when it comes to my computing experience: the lack of an 'always-on' web/database server that would allow me to work on some personal programming projects, since I don't like having my PowerBook on 24/7. I could just buy an Intel box, but looking at some of the horror stories of how much power P4s consume, and living in Germany where electricity is not cheap, I wanted to see what suggestions the Slashdot community has for low-cost, low-power, headless servers. My only requirements are that it can run Linux and preferably cost less than $500. Is this possible? What architecture should I go with?"
$20-$40/month, and you get full control. You don't have to worry about the direct costs of the electricity, or the machine (in case it breaks). If you don't need it, you're only out the money for the time you've been using it. $500 would buy you at least a year of service, if not more.
A Sempron in a mini-tower?
small, cheap, lower power consumption.
I've also been wondering for the same thing. I now was with a long disputed battle to leave on a 30watts 800MHz P3 always on.
This server is now, my storage server and also acts as a mirror for Fedora Core on their torrent (makes my connection useful).
So I want to know what slashdotters will suggest!
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
http://www.viaembedded.com/
The mini-itx and nano-itx boards require little power to operate, can run any X86 based OS, and some can run off of flash memory devices with no addons required.
The only drawback to these is that their overall performace is not as fast as their AMD or Intel counterparts, but if silence, space and power savings is what you are looking for then these are a great solution.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Is there any reason you can't run the web and database servers locally on your laptop so that it's always available when you need it, but not using power otherwise?
It's at Newegg for 107USD.
2 E16856110030
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
Add a few bits and you've got a complete low power system.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
DFI has a micro-atx desktop motherboard (855GME-MGF) with support for Pentium M chips. The P4 mobile chips are fast, run cool, and use very little power.
Link to Motherboard
ASUS makes an adaptor that allows the use of P4-M CPUs in standard motherboards, but from what I've seen it uses significantly more power than the DFI option (about 25% more)
The subject says it all...
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Athlon64s don't seem to use much power. I haven't been able to measure the usage of the entire board, of course, but my Venice core doesn't get above 50 degrees celsius, and I've got it overclocked to 2.4 ghz. At stock, it didn't get above 40. It can't be using too much power.
In fact, I think my amd64 server that I leave on all the time, complete with TV tuner / capture card (and a PCI-X card with TV out), gigabit ethernet, 1.8 ghz amd64 Venice, 1 gig of RAM, and a couple of 250 gig hard drives (doing RAID), wasn't too much more than $500. Drop some of the toys, and it'll get pretty affordable.
Another option would be to find some cheap virtual webhosting (not dedicated) -- compare your potential power bill with their total cost of service. Of course, it wouldn't be completely under your control, but it might be close enough.
And finally, why wouldn't you have your Powerbook on 24/7? I do, at least sleeping. The battery is good for about four hours of low-intensity work (text and such), and I can usually find a wireless network and somewhere to plug it in. To be honest, I wouldn't want to do it that way, but just keep it in mind.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm sure you mean Pentium M. P4-M is practically the same as P4, but Pentium M is the sane choice when you're talking low power with high performance.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The systems usually sell with case, mb, and CPU.
They start at about $200.
Depending on the case, you can use a 2.5" or 3.5" HD, and usually a slim CD or DVD.
Mini-ITX.com has LOTS of info.
If you get a VIA, make sure its a recent one (C3?) as the older ones aren't fully 686 compatible so some software won't run on them.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Specifically old laptops with bad screens or batteries that do not work anymore can be quite cheap.
For example here is an old IBM thinkpad with a battery that does not hold a charge for 150 euro.
http://paris.craigslist.org/sys/92369116.html
Adding a PCMCIA NIC should not be too expensive.
If you want a really cheap system I bet you can find an old pentium or pentium 2 system someone is discarding or recycling.
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
Also running a Mini-ITX server at home. With an 800MHz C3 CPU it's not the fastest machine on the planet but even with two hard drives in it consumes less than 100 watts @ 230v
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
buy a dreamcast.
You want a server for under $500 that is low powered.
Why not pick up an old pentium and throw in a large HDD? Total cost should be less then $200. There may or may not be a 160GBish or so limit, my current setup uses a small HDD (4GB) to boot up off of and mount an 80GB drive that the bios can't see. A cheapo IDE card would also solve this problem.
But, you cry, low powered! Simple enough. An old pentium probably isn't even using 100W to spin the disks. That is 2.4 kWh/day, or about $0.24/day if you spend $0.10 pr kWh. After a year, that will come to $87.60. (To be realistic, an old headless pentium probably will be closer to 50W instead of 100W, which makes the total cost under $50/year!) You could look at the linux green computing FAQ, which probably has tips to further lower that amount by spinning down disks.
So for about the cost of a HDD and IDE adapter, and a yearly payment of under $50, you'd have a personal, cheap server.
Or you could investigate the nice standby/hibernate options in that laptop of yours and spend no money while having a system that will power up almost instantly.
Get a linksys NSLU2. It's a network attached storage unit, but it can be flashed with a firmware that lets you basically run Debian on it. Right now, one is serving mail, web, and storage for my domain.
It's no 4-way Xeon when it comes to performance, but at 8W power consumption and a $75 pricetag, you can't go wrong.
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
I'm actually writing an article on how to run a domain from one of those things for AnandTech, so in a few weeks you can read about it there. (Tom's Hardware did an article, but it isn't very good or accurate anymore. Stick with the nslu2-linux site.)
My other car is first.
Last time I checked, Silverstone is retooling to produce modified cases, but the nano-ITX/LC0[7|8] combo will not be silent: Via nixed the option to let Silverstone use the nano-ITX moniker unless their case accomodated a fan and not a heat block (like their original LC-07 and LC-08 designs). (The new LC-07 nd LC-08 cases supposedly will have vent holes in the top -- ugh!).
These specs are subject to change, and should not be considered definitive. Contact Via and or Silverstone yourself if you want to pursue this option.
You could've hired me.
They are completely headless AMD Geode machines... 266mhz Pentium class, with 128mb of RAM. They're primarily meant as routing devices for wireless networks (they have three network ports, and 1 3.3v PCI and 1 miniPCI slot). They are completely fanless, and have a socket for a Compact Flash, which is the normal boot device. They also have a connection for a laptop-style hard drive, and a USB 1.1 port.
Now, these little guys can really be a chore to get set up, because they have no true video... they route the BIOS text-display calls out through the serial port. And they have no floppy to boot from, so you must either set up a PXE boot environment (what I did the first time... NOT a trivial process for someone who isn't very familiar with Linux and/or the BSDs), or build a bootable CF or laptop drive on another system.
If you can muscle past the installation difficulty, the boards themselves are absolutely silent, with no moving parts at all. For your application, you'd probably boot off a laptop IDE drive. Most of these small drives aren't designed to be on 24x7, so be sure to look around for one that supports a long duty cycle, and even at that, take regular backups.
This would give you a small, very low-power solution. The Geode is extremely efficient. I'd have to look it up, but from memory I think it's like 7.5 watts. You could spend more running a nightlight. The drive will add some to that, but it'll definitely stay under 15w, and maybe under 10. It's reasonably powerful, with a decent amount of RAM, and will make very little noise and take up very little space.
I'm using one of these boxes as a router/firewall, and I like it very much. I hate noise, and with a CF, it is both silent and should last many, many years... no moving parts at all. Folks on the mailing list have claimed that it can sustain 10 megabits comfortably with moderately complex firewalling, and as much as 30 megabits if it's just routing between interfaces. It's not a speed demon, but it's really not bad.
Another possibility might be the Linksys NSLU2, which is a NAS device that runs Linux, and is apparently pretty hackable. It would be even harder than the Soekris to get going, though...and it's not X86, if that matters. I don't know much about them, but others may chime in with more data.
Use the Wake-on-LAN feature of your network card.
I have a computer that remains in hibernation until it receives network traffic. I have it set up to only wake-on-lan when it receives a magic packet (I configured my router to accept these packets over the internet). So when I need to work on my webprojects I usually run through this:
1. Send magic packet to my home IP (the router takes care of the rest)
2. wait about 20 seconds for my server to awake and acquire an IP
3. go on with my work as if the server had never been down.
I also have the server set to hibernate if it's been idle for 10 minutes, so I don't use very much electricity at all.
I just pooped your party.
It must really suck to be you. I've got a 2.8Ghz 512MB RAM 200GB HD system sitting under my desk. It draws about 100 watts under load and probably 50-75 watts when in energy saver mode (assuming an OpenGL screen saver isn't running). It's no mega server but, it is quite adequate for my personal needs and with its variable speed fan it's really very quiet as well.
I'm happy to say that I couldn't care less about a 100 watt draw. the cost of a single light bulb, on 24 hours a day, is negligible. It must suck to be you.
Linux linux 2.6.11.4-21.7-smp #1 SMP Thu Jun 2 14:23:14 UTC 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
7:01pm up 36 days 10:00, 4 users, load average: 0.31, 0.29, 0.14
Have you considered just getting an account with some managed hosting place? VPS servers are cheap. US$30/mo gets you one here: http://www.rapidvps.com/?page=services , and I've been happy with mine. There are other cheaper places as low as US$10/mo that I've seen. You get root on your own virtual system, some disk, some memory, and some CPU cycles, and you don't have to pay for power, or up-front for the hardware, or any ongoing maintenance, and you'll have better net connectivity than you can probably get from home.
At least my high school did. They offer a few computer classes, from programming to web design to hardware and networking. All through the year we surplused out old P2s, and a few of the student techs (including me) got to dig through the machines before they went to the warehouse. At the end of the year, one of the computer teachers had a old P2 and a P3 that he didn't need, and couldn't surplus since they were donated, not standard equipment provided by the school. I was in the right place at the right time, and picked them up for free. The p2 was pretty much useless, since it was slow and was one of those cases that bring pain to even look into, but the P3 was an old IBM. Put the memory and the hard drive into the P3, trashed the p2, and brought it home. Linuxed it up, made sure the network cards and RAM were good, tossed in a couple of large hard drives for data, and I've got my server. I also got a better P3 (450MHz=>600MHz) for free from a friend from a computer he was junking, so it's a rather decent server.
Colleges also have high tech turnover rates, so check them, too.
Are these personal projects that you need to access from computers other than your PowerBook? If not, why not just run them on your PowerBook when you're using it? The built-in Apache and PHP work great, and it's simple to add a MySQL database. I wrote a little script that makes it possible to host multiple virtual hosts under Mac OS X, though they're only accessible from that computer by default. (I use NetInfoManager to add additional host names that point at 127.0.0.1.)
why not pick up the USD 499 Mac Mini? Mine is working just fine as a small server.
This sig kills fascists.
There was a company out here in Ottawa Rebel, they used a MIPS process that was an extremly lower power consumption processor (same one used in a Compaq/HP Ipaq) and that company died a horrible death. No one CARES about power consumption! They care about is the power of the processor only.
Pegasos PPC
As I've understood it there are plans for new modells, among those Freescales new PPC7448 (something like dual-core G4 with 64-bit instructions, altivec, and 10watt at 1.5GHz or so. That might be incorrect.)
I don't remember chipset names and so on.
I'm running several sites on my Mac Mini. I'm using OS X but it'll run Linux just fine from what I hear. Might not be the fastest thing on the planet but you said 'personal', right? I'm running MySQL, Geeklog, Gallery, and many other things on it and the limit is bandwidth (256k up DSL), not CPU.
It's quiet enough to keep in the bedroom (the nearby TiVo is louder) and it's much faster than the PIII/500 Compaq Deskpro EN SFF that it replaced (that's another low-power box, and those corporate Compaqs last forever) though half the reason I switched was because it's just so much easier to get everything working on OS X.*
Plus, it'll work great with your PB (native file sharing = easy two-way backups) which in turn will be the perfect portable development environment since it's got the same OS. This guy has some really good guides on doing ISP-like stuff under OS X and Marc is your source for all the packages you'll need.
* I've been using Linux since 1998 but every time I put together a box I can never get everything working at once. My last attempt with Fedora resulted in a box with PHP and MySQL, but PHP did not have something it needed to talk to MySQL. Another box had PHP and MySQL but something else didn't want to take, and so on, and so on.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've got one of the fanless 533mhz C3's on a VIA EDEN board. All the stuff you would need for a light server, uses about 7 watts, and ran most major Linux distros without any extra drivers as of a few years ago. Running tomcat to front end a MP3 collection for my car, so I guess counts. (grin) All told, the mainboard/CPU was ~100USD, and the total project was about ~250USD mostly due to building a DC to DC power supply that played nice with a 12V system.
I pushed things a bit further and replaced the 'power hungry' 4200-RPM laptop HDD with an IDE to Flash card adapter to save even more juice. Was trying for a bit to have a separate battery pack that could charge on solar cells. (no joy yet on that part) Just one word of warning if you go that route - make darn sure your swap file stays in RAM.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
an xbox running debian with a bigger HD...?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I'm in a similar position. Compute power isn't important, but power consumption and noise are. I used an old 486 IBM Thinkpad for 2 years in such a server role, and that worked great. It was a little slow with the apt-gets, but that was my only complaint. Since then, I took it up to a PowerMac 7600 and although I didn't get out the power meter, it seemed to fit the bill nicely and the price was right (honestly only really wanted more RAM).
My next computer for this role may well be an old Powerbook (either with a stock drive, 2 or 4 GB CompactFlash to IDE bridge or an external fanless firewire drive. Or it could be a Mac Mini, which are less than $400 on eBay if you're not looking for a lot of bling bling. Maybe you're willing to go the PC ATX route and follow the Cyrix / Duron / Celeron stuff all the way with underclocking, but my home server will not receive that kind of research. I'll put in the minimal amount of effort to get it going and then toss on Debian who keeps tabs on security very well. Used Apple hardware fits that so well that it's like it was designed for it. I think there's a reason used Apple hardware keeps its value so well (except for some of the Mac Minis bought by PC enthusiasts who changed their minds back).
Ok,
;-)
.html ( written in Java )
Weighing in with my two cents worth, for what it's worth, I'd like to brain dump what I would consider worth while options for your needs. All of these are solutions I either have used in the past successfully, or am currently using for various purposes. So bear in mind that this is not just the causal musings of a thread cruiser, but actual tried and proven solutions
First some basic assumptions:
1) You want to run some form of Unix or Unix like system ( i.e. Linux ) - you've noted you currently use your Apple PowerBook laptop, so one has to assume you're running Mac OS X 10.x.x natively ( more power to you ).
2) You want complete control over the system including "root" access 24/7 - this is of course the whole point of having your own system, you can beat it up, break it, rebuild it, and all that jazz.
3) The system should be able to be run remotely, even if just headless on your LAN, or perhaps more ideally remotely from some external 3rd party in a hosted solution so you don't end up having to host it behind your link at home ( also making it easier for you to provide access to other parties should you want to either share it with friends and family or if you just want to make it world visible for whatever reason - i.e. your own mail and web server et al ).
4) You want an "always on" solution, so this should be something that, as you state, should not suck too much juice power wise, is able to be built with a "standard build" style hardened platform, which in the case of power loss would ideally recover nicely, quickly, and be back on line ( I'll touch on this later as standard builds are going to make your life so much simpler and fun ).
5) The performance of the system ideally should be such that it will cope with the key elements you've noted in your post, such as:
a) remote access such as remote sessions via SSH won't kill the system
b) able to run a web server such as:
thttpd: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
Apache: http://www.apache.org/
mathopd: http://mathop.diva.nl/
Roxen: http://www.roxen.com/
Boa: http://www.boa.org/
Jigsaw: http://www.w3.org/Jigsaw/ ( written in Java )
Acme.Serve: http://www.acme.com/java/software/Acme.Serve.Serve
CERN: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Status.html
NCSA: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
Netscape FastTrack: http://home.netscape.com/ ( not sure if it's still available )
Netscape Enterprise: http://home.netscape.com/ ( not sure if it's still available )
Zeus: http://www.zeus.co.uk/
source: http://www.acme.com
--- Dez Blanchfield http://WebSearch.COM.AU "Will work for bandwidth.."
Lamp, Apache, MySQL, PostSQL, etc.
'runs in text-mode on slow machines with 64 MB
Check DistroWatch.com for the latest version.
Economically it makes no sense to go any other way unless there is an overriding reason to do so. Push the security updates, costs, and maintenance off to someone else.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
... that should be reasonably in-expensive, as well as not drawing all that much power.
Go to e-bay and pick up a Zaurus SL-5500, check price watch for a 1 gig SD card, and find a network adapter that works in your environment. (10/100 wired Hawking cf-network card, or linksys wifi cf card perhaps.)
Add Apache, to make it a web server, Samba to make it a file server. Granted it won't have a lot of storage space, but if you are just looking for something to host a small personal web site, do a bit of programing in perl or python, it may be enough.
Asside from the flash SD card, you should be able to pick up the 5500 and network adapter for under $200. 1 Gig SD cards are under $100 in my area of the states, don't know about in Germany.
The power brick draws something like 1800mw at 110v, so 900mw at 220. So, less than a watt of power to compare against the other alternatives listed. You don't have to build an entirely new system, and figure out what of it will work with Linux, (it's already running Linux) and so on.
Is it a perfect solution? Probably not. Can it work? Sure.
-Rusty
You never know...
Woud the KuroBox suit your purposes?
Hmm... the Revolution Store and main web site appear to be undergoing some sort of maintenance at the moment, but the wiki is still online...
I originally saw this on robots,net, but it looks like it might suit your needs...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
it's bad enough having two PPC machines that will be effectively obsoleted by the advent of the MacIntels
WTF is up with this asinine mentality? If you want/need the machine now, just buy the friggin' thing. PPC Macs won't cease working the day the first Intel-based Macs go on sale!
Freescale just committed to supplying Apple with chips through 2008 if necessary, so the hardware transition could be very gradual. Furthermore, any Mac software worth running will be available as a universal binary through at least 2010 if not a year or two longer than that. There are millions upon millions of PPC Macs out in the world, and most of those Macs will not be replaced by their owners until their useful life is over (which IME is 4-5 years on average).
I've got two beige Power Macs in my spare bedroom that are a couple months shy of their 9th birthdays, and they have been performing admirably as servers running OS 9 for the last 4 years since coming off workstation duty. They are about to be retired and replaced by a dual-450MHz G4 that was made in 2000, and that's only because I want to move all my systems to OS X.
I am running FreeBSD 5.4 on a Via Epia ME6000 mini-itx system that cost less than $350 for the motherboard, a half Gig of memory, and a case (all new parts). It has an old hard disk and uses about 40 watts running 24/7 as a mail server, web server, and radio time shifter (see http://www.io.com/~rotenber/ ).
When I wish I can fire up XORG, Xfce4, and Firefox to surf the web, and as far as I can tell this does not slow down any of the other services.
In my opinion this system is the perfect server, although I would probably choose a different case since both case fans died in the first year of service.
I am also running FC3 on a Epia ME10000, so I am pretty sure the ME6000 would run Linux as well (be sure to use the VIA video driver).
In the early 2000s, there were several "Internet Applicances" which sold for the then-low-cost of $300-$500. They were lowball-priced because they had "vendor lock in" to a particular ISP, and without hacking you couldn't do much except use them as an "Internet Terminal."
Most draw very little current, and while not headless they did have an LCD screen and wireless keyboard. Some even had touch screens.
Most of them ran Linux and booted from a small HD or flash media.
Depending on your needs, they may be powerful enough to boot Linux + remote-management software + drivers + server software.
You may have to add a USB network device (some used non-Ethernet network devices) and a USB writable hard disk, or use the LAN for swap. Storage may be an issue because some static-memory cards could only tolerate a few thousand writes over their lifetime, making them unsuitable for swap.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
John Andrews, the guy responsible for Damn Small Linux, also has a store where he sells Mini-ITX systems suited to running DSL. He recently announced his Damn Small Machine, which may not be enough to do the job, but a noiseless, no-moving-parts machine is still interesting.
In includes onboard:
- Cardreader
- PCMCIA slot (1)
- 10/100 Ethernet (VT6102 [Rhine-II])
- Firewire
- USB 2.0
- VIA Nehamiah CPU 1GHz
- Soundcard (VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97)
- Video (VT8623 [Apollo CLE266] )
I've run the Epia machines on DC power units connected to as low as a 40W power brick (total system power including drive, etc). After you get the board, all you need need is the PSU and RAM, everything else is included. The lower power units also can run fanless I believe.Yesterday's webserver was a P2-300 with probably 256MB of memory and a 40 gig (if you were lucky) hard drive. Actually, there was probably a RAID box in there, but you get what I am saying...
These kinds of boxes are thrown away today, and are still perfectly servable (load up a LAMP system) for home-base web development. They won't pull the power of a new P4 system, and if you want lower power, underclock the sucker. You *will not* tax this box with development only (heck, unless you are running a high-profile website, you could easily put it in service publically if you wanted to and it would be fine).
When you have your development done, then think about a better server. If you can get your stuff working well on a small web server like this is, it will work even better on a real (current) system. Get your development web server for free or nearly free now, spend the real money later.
If you need to make it even lower power, find a P2 based laptop or similar off ebay, pimp it out with a larger hard drive and memory, add a NIC and go (side benefit - "free" UPS if the battery works)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Get an old Pentium One 133MHz or something. You don't need that much CPU for a headless box that is just moving stuff from the hard drive to the wire. I have a 90MHz Pent box that is my firewall, mailserver, MRTG, and webserver. There is nothing that a 1.5Mb/s DSL pipe can do to swamp it. Save the P4 for games and editing video, or running XP.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I tried this, the EPIA architecture was weak for server use. Linux ran poorly on it, GCC doesn't compile well for the C3, and the quality of the hardware was substandard.
What I would do is pick up an ancient Power Mac G3 tower (blue and white). It consumes very little power, has only one fan, will run indefinitely, and has 'server-quality' components. Your number one concern with a home server is throughput, and the G3 tower provides it with 64-bit PCI slots, ATA-100, PC-100 RAM, and built-in Fast Ethernet.
I have mine decked out with an adaptec Ultra160 SCSI card coupled with a 10K RPM drive, which is great for serving files I want low-latency access to (read: home directories). I have a big ATA-100 drive for the files I want to stash (read: media). The box is, for all intents and purposes, silent.
I'd stay away from the EPIA, the built-in ethernet is low quality, as is the video chipset, the processor is weaker then a G3 at half the speed, and you have very limited expansion via the lonely 32-bit/33MHz PCI.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails