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?"

Comments

Localhost

[Alethes]

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?

Low Power, Small Size, try an old laptop.

[DoubleD]

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.

Re:mini-itx

[woobieman29]

Indeed, Mini-itx is perfect for this. For your needs you can get away with an older generation 733 or 800 mhz processor that you could pickup for next to nothing (especially if you ebay it). One really cheap way to get one of these boards would be to look locally or on Ebay for someone getting rid of a bunch of the thin client devices that run these boards. I have an old Maxspeed unit that had a Mini-ITX 800mhz that originally booted off of a Compact Flash card. That would definitely be the ticket for ultra low power consumption (there isn't even a fan running) and it can run Linux/Windows/whatever. It's quite easy to add a hard drive if you want as well. Awesome for a file server, mild traffic web server, or even a MySQL database.

Good luck!

NSLU2

[jrockway]

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.)

Do what I do: WOL

[Bozzio]

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.