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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?"
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?
why not pick up the USD 499 Mac Mini? Mine is working just fine as a small server.
This sig kills fascists.
an xbox running debian with a bigger HD...?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
* 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.
Have you considered that, perhaps, despite using linux for 7 years, you're bad at it?
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
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 don't know what the poster's requirements for fileserving are, but many miniITX solutions have only one IDE port on-board. Granted, these days you can stick a couple 500GB drives on something and call it a day, but that's the thing that keeps me away from it as a platform.
If the disk subsystem is an issue, I'd suggest something in an Athlon mobile or Athlon64 mobile. Low power, noise and heat, combined with modern and full-featured system boards AND a CPU that's up for real work if need be (and if not, it'll throttle back to 500ish MHz). Plus the mobile chips are surprisingly cheap.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K