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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?"
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!
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."
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.
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.
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 also been wondering for the same thing. I now was with a long disputed battle to leave on a 30watts 800MHz P3 always on.
Personally, I have two always-on machines... My internet gateway, and my file server (both running Linux). I recently upgraded both from old P3 machines, which suck 30W each just for the CPU, as you mention.
For my Masq'ing box, I went with an Epia CL 600 and a 512MB CF disk (via a CF to IDE adapter). Won't break any number-crunching records, but it sips a nice 28W, total, at-the-wall. Best of all, I could run it fanless, which would make it have no moving parts at all. I didn't like that it would creep up above 50C, however, so threw in an as-close-to-silent-as-you-can-get 120mm fan, keeping it down in the low 30s.
For the file server, I used an Athlon 64 (90nm Winchester 3000). Before drives, it sucks under 50W (again, at-the-wall). Each drive will add 15-25W, so scale up from there. The whole system, however, can realistically draw less than just a naked P4, if I limited it to only two drives (but of course I have more than that, currently four, each as the master with no slave).
One interesting point I'd like to see discussed, if anyone has a few good links - Motherboard power consumption (aside from the CPU), and "real world" HDD draw. I have three Winchester 3000s (two of which I plan to drop X2s in when they come down in price a tad) in three different motherboards, and they vary by 20W (ie, half the total) idle power use (with the same low-end PCI video card, except one system has on-board video a hell of a lot stronger than that old Trident card (an ATI Radeon XPress 200), and it sucks the least power of the three). Then for HDDs, I can of course find the published TDP, but as with CPUs, that means very close to nothing beyond "make sure your power supply can handle this, but it will never actually need to".
And, as a last point, if you care about shaving off a few more watts more than money or horsepower (but want something heftier than an Epia), get a Pentium-M board. They can manage around half the power consumption of an Athlon 64 (3W vs 7W idle, and (roughly) 25W vs 50W at load), with around 80% of the performance. At idle (an always-on home server sits idle over 99% of the time, I'd say, unless you stick something like Seti@Home on it), that should compare well (wattage-wise) even to a high-end Epia board.
My internet gateway, and my file server (both running Linux). I recently upgraded both from old P3 machines, which suck 30W each just for the CPU, as you mention.
.75GB, the new one is at 2GB.
One of the reasons I dumped the idea of running an internet gateway on a PC was the power consumption. I now run a gateway appliance that draws about 5 watts. For my file server up antil recently I was running a dual P2 400 that drew 60 watts idle (with one HD spinning). My experience is that HD's draw about 7 watts per spindle to keep them spinning.
Recently I decided that the P2-2 wasn't giving me enough compute power for some of the jobs I needed to run, so I decided to upgrade - knowing that the result would be an increase in power consumption. After looking at a lot of reviews I decided to try an Athlon X2 4400 on an Asus SLI AN8 Premium with a low end ATI video card (the ATIs draw less power than the NVidias). After tweaking a bit I got the power consumption down to 85 watts idle with one spindle running. The low power modes cut the CPU down to 1 GHz which is where the system runs unless it needs to do something really comuot intensive. I think that the 25 watts additional is pretty worthwhile given the vastly greater (x10 at least) compute power available with this system. The problem with a lot of these low end options is that the power per unit of work isn't that great even though the total power consuption is low.
It is quite possible over time I might get a few more watts squeezed out of the system by tweeaking the fans, voltages, etc.
I've been using the Kill-a-Watt wattmeter which is available from a lot of internet outlets for $30 or so and seems to work quite well for the money.
One thing I haven't sorted out yet is what the power consumption of RAM is. My old machine had
Has any software vendor signed a contract with Apple promising to continue fat binary releases until after 10.7 comes out?
If an app that is written with Xcode runs on x86-based Macs, it will run on PPC Macs. Period. It's just an extra checkbox to check at compile time to compile for both architectures. I don't think it's really necessary for Apple to have anyone sign a contract agreeing that they'll keep checking a checkbox, do you?
Given that the installed base of PPC Macs will be larger than the installed base of x86 Macs for years to come, and that the additional cost of supporting both platforms is basically zero, only exceedingly stupid developers won't be releasing universal binaries for the rest of this decade.
I didn't spend $3000 on a PowerMac G5 for it to be a home file server, thank you, I bought it as a workstation.
I bought my beige Power Macs to be workstations, too. And they were, for five years before they were pressed into server duty. I'd certainly say that I got my money's worth out of them as workstations. I don't plan to replace my year-old G5 until 2009 or 2010, either.