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Replacing a Personal Rack-Mounted Server?
Starky writes "Many moons ago, I cobbled together a 1U rack mount from parts which has since been diligently serving up my homepage and web sites for family and friends. It's a truly "Mom and Pop Shop" setup, running on a rack secluded in a closet at home over a DSL line. At the time, I was able to piggyback my order on a large order placed by a company for which I was working, allowing me to get a substantial discount.
Now, the time has come to consider a replacement. However, I no longer work at a company that orders chassis and chips by the dozen. I would like to get a rack-mountable chassis, but don't know where to go as a lowly individual consumer looking for a box with minimal specifications (1 processor, dual drives, and 1G RAM is about all I need) at a reasonable price.
Any recommendation from Slashdotters who maintain their own rigs?"
Granted, my home server isn't rackmounted (exactly because I don't know where to get the rack, etc...), but it runs OpenBSD and currently uses a whopping 31Meg RAM. It does routing/firewalling, DHCP server, NTP server, Samba Server, DNS server (not forwarding, but a full one), email server, webserver including a webmail interfact, IMAP and I'm most likely skipping some stuff.
It's only a P-III 800MHz with 768Meg (my old desktop) and I have playroom if you consider the load average: 0.32, 0.19, 0.12
Hey, but you most certainly have your reasons. I guess eBay is a way to get what you look for...
The rack-mounted chassis is what costs more than the normal PC parts, so just re-use the one you already have and order the rest of it from anywhere. You should be able to buy what you're looking for for less than $400 if you don't have to order the chassis.
You can get a low cost dell server for cheap, 1u or even cheaper if you go with a low end desk-side server.
Why do you need a rack mount? Seems like for a home server a quiet desk-side server would be easier to keep cool and quiet, and more space conservative.
The one thing I will note about rackmount servers is that they are all very noisy. For home installation, a desktop chassis will nearly always fit your needs and will be much quieter and more power-efficient than a rackmount. I recently replaced my home server with about $850 in parts from newegg. If you're interested in making a quiet desktop, take a look at SilentPCReview.
If you're set on a rackmount server, I've been very happy with Silicon Mechanics, but their cheapest machine is still ~$1000.
NewEgg or ZipZoomFly have motherboards, CPUs, Drives, and memory. But the big question is why update? What is wrong with the current server? I am sure you could saturate that DSL line with the server you have so why upgrade? Maybe just upgrade the disk? Or maybe more memory.
Your other option is to watch Geeks.com. Every now and then they have cheap refurbished servers.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Perhaps you should look into setting up a beowulf cluter!
Pogo Linux has some nice gear for cheap.
You really even need to ask? E-Bay! That or suck it up and just use a desktop tower, it'll take more room but give you much more flexibility on the cheap,
Looks to me like someone has never heard of Pricewatch.... Since you seem incapable of using a search engine, I'll help you out... here is one that I found for you http://www.surpluscomputers.com/store/Main.aspx?p=ItemDetail&item=com10775
Its $200 and surpasses your demands.... should you need more, they sell a dual core for about $100 more. If that will be all, I'm outta here. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Try newegg.com. They have barebones rackmount servers starting at $350 or so.
Actually, I've had some good luck finding older but still very very usable rackmount systems on eBay. Seems there's never a shortage of companies getting rid of year-old kit they just upgraded.
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NewEgg has some relatively inexpensive Asus and SuperMicro chassis to chose from: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=8&name=Server-Barebones
What a waste of space and energy. One rack mounted server in your closet makes about as much sense as hamburger ear muffs.
Get a tower. Cheaper, takes less space and is quieter.
You're getting a Dell! Srsly tho, you can get rackmount servers from them for cheaper than you can build them yourself.
both have slightly older rack mounted computers on the cheap. in the order of $100 - $400. I've seen a dual xeon with 4 drives for like $250.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I am just wondering if it has to be 1U. You can get a nice 4U server complete for $350. It is close to your specs already. Just upgrade RAM, and add a second hard drive, possibly upgrade processor (it has an Intel 775 socket motherboard with 1066FSB Core 2 Duo processor support). So $30 for extra RAM, $60 for disk, and possibly $200 for new CPU, you are still just in the $500-600 range, which isn't bad at all. http://www.superlogics.com/rackmount-computer/rackmount-computers/SL-4U-CL-M900-HA/316-2541.htm
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I am also in the market, but I am worried about heat issues in the closet. Are there servers that are more heat tolerant than others? I tried looking at some military grade stuff, but a lot of these vendors are hard to place orders with. Is there a way to build a machine that is very tolerant of heat?
I agree with most of the points on here. 1) Rackmounts are excessively loud in "most" instances, so unless you need a small height factor or already have a rack to put it in, I'd recommend getting a desktop of some sort. Power usage should be another concern if you're going to have it running 24x7. That being said, ebay is a great place to pick up rack mount computers. One example are the IBM e326 servers which use AMD processors. You can pick up one of those for ~$250 with an Opteron 250 and 1 GB of RAM. (They went for about $2k new).
Come on, there are tons of rackable servers out there. If you don't feel like putting together parts, go to dell. They start at $800. http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/rack_optimized?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
/. I guess next we'll be asked
If you don't want to spend that much, go to newegg, search for 1u and enjoy the 379 results.
If you want something in between; http://www.google.com/search?q=1u+server
There's no need to place a huge order for this type stuff. And there's no need to ask
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
www.system76.com if you're into Ubuntu...
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Not really an endorsement, but here's one:
http://www.asaservers.com/config.asp?config_id=V112
I'm sure there plenty more like them out there...
My friends, their friends, and their friends (like, people I've never heard of), always end up coming to me for this same advice.
:)
:)
Sometimes I give/sell them parts out of my garage, because their old equipment also somehow ends up in my garage.
I tend to like SuperMicro equipment, so if you have a few bucks to spend, go find yourself a nice SuperMicro 1u. But since this is your personal machine, and you don't have a huge budget, you'll have to shop like I do.
Check out the VisionMan machines on tigerdirect.com. For about $550, you can get a 2Ghz dual core with 1Gb RAM, 2 160Gb SATA drives
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/search.asp?page=2&mnf=1286&sort=Price%20asc
I haven't bought any yet, but if I ever run out of parts in my garage for new servers, I'll probably buy one.
You can always go browsing on eBay. Sometimes you'll find a good deal, but generally you're not going to get much decent for under $500. There are resellers on there all the time, who grab up anything cheap (or bid them up to over $500), that they're going to sell to their customers. If you do, be cautious of home built machines. They're the best thing in the world if they're done right, but if they weren't, you can experience lots of nasty problems. Like, if there isn't enough air flow, the CPU can overheat, and in a week or two you may end up looking for a new machine again.
I was building my own 1u machines for quite a while. When we approached 1Ghz, I had to start doing some special cooling. After that, since the company was making good money, it was cost effective to get the SuperMicro machines.
The final option is... I needed an incoming mail server to filter viruses and spam. This was a rather urgent matter, and I didn't really have time to go through my garage piecing a machine together and test it. I also didn't have time to order anything. I went down to CompUSA (they re-opened close to my house), and picked up an eMachines AMD64 with 1Gb ram for $250. It's a tower case, but if I felt ambitious (which I didn't that night), I could have easily rebuilt it into a spare 2u case. The memory was not seated well when I unboxed it, but that's the only problem that it's had so far, and it's been running hard for a few weeks.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I mean seriously, a few minutes of quality time spent with Google shows many, many low cost server options.
I tend to agree with a lot of the posters here though who ask "Why rackmount?" I see no logical reason for it other than the 'cool/geek' factor.
I would consider an AMD Geode chip. It likely faster than you need, and you can get a motherboard/cpu/heatsink combo for around $100. They usually take DDR1 memory and 1GB DDR1 is very inexpensive. Video is built in, like most proper server boards. The power savings will probably be substantial over a "server motherboard" type computer also.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
They specialize in like new lease returned hardware, including Big Iron. I got an HP Proliant from them for a song last year. www.escorp.com
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I have build a couple of these for colos, but they are low cost, quiet, and low power, so you might be interested.
Start with a Supermicro 1U 510. This is 11" deep with an 80+ efficiency 200W power supply. It will house most uATX motherboards, although you will have to nibble out the back panel to get non supermicro boards to fit.
Then add a low cost AMD socket-AM2 motherboard.
Put a low power 45W dual core like a BE-2400 or one of the newer series. You will need a 1U blower for this.
Put one 3.5" drive (or up to 4 2.5" drives).
With a Gigabyte board and 1 2.5" HDD + 1 2.5" SSD, my system draws 37 watts in use as measured from the power line. It is not 100% quiet, but is the quietest of any 1U I have worked with.
I'm replacing a dying server, and for various reasons I'm getting a Dell, probably the PowerEdge 840. My questions:
To those who would tell me (and this story's poster) to Google it: I'd rather get today's recommendations from an interactive forum than try to find a website with the same information from the last year or so. Besides, what geek doesn't want to talk about hardware?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Perhaps I am confused. Why exactly do you want a rack-mounted server for this? Why not just use an old PC, most people have scads of these things sitting around. Better yet, use something like the VIA NAS 7800 and throw it in a nice small quiet case. Compared to some crappy old 1U server, you'll save hundreds of dollars a year in electricity costs alone if the thing is on 24x7.
Dude, you must be new here. 90+% of Ask Slashdot questions can be answered in some form by Google, people ask questions here to get a particular informed answer to the question from a group of fellow geeks.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm thinking about adding another 5501 in the same case for firewalling, routing and providing wireless for the rest of my network.
Power usage is minimal, it is *completely* silent (no fans) and it has been proven to be rock solid.
More info at Soekris or kd85.
Disclosure: I'm just a happy customer.
I have seen Via cpu/motherboard combos on newegg for under $50. Really cheap and low power. The motherboard for the GPC that Walmart was selling also runs about $50.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Are you #()*& insane? Why would you want a rack mount anything, especially in your home? Rack stuff, especially 1U, is noisy (it has to have small fans that spin really fast) and it's an inconvenient form factor unless you really need to pack a lot of equipment into a space. The rack alone takes up 21"x42"xheight, so unless you actually need something on the order of 336 CPU cores (42U of two-way quad cores), rack mount is a horrible idea. Ditch the rack and buy yourself a Shuttle barebones P238 (no, I don't work for them, but I do have shelves, not racks, full of them and they work great). Put 8G of memory, a few Raptor HDs, and a quad core in it and the whole thing will be less than $2500 from NewEgg for a sweet system. Then, put it any where you please because it's dead quiet and always ice cold (we do weather modeling on them, so we run the CPUs at 100% for days at a time).
Seriously.
I used to have a dual CPU P3 1U rackmount server I used for those sort of things. A day of running it through a Kill-A-Watt showed me it was costing almost $40 a month in electricity.
That buys a LOT of hosting when you look at places like dreamhost, etc.
And almost all of them are worthless unless you already know exactly what you want. Hardware changes so fast that sometimes it's hard to know what the good gear is this month.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Seriously, I had the exact same concerns recently, however I refuse to listen to the insane noise usually coming from an 1U rack..
I bought a cheap mac mini (intel core solo) on ebay, gutted it, replaced the CPU, added 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB drive.. I then put an external 250 GB drive on top of it. Alternatively buy a brand new Mac mini with the specs you need.
There you go - $600 or so and you have a totally silent "home server".
I bought a pair of 1U dual PIIIs on eBay for about $50 each. The drive bays were missing of course but they can also be found on eBay. Toss in a couple of drives and away you go. Cheap and effective.
I got a small 1U 150w celeron system for less than $50, but you have to go in to find that kind of stuff.
They have nice current systems too.
http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=10174
highly recommended
I was recently looking for a low end 1U server, and the cheapest that I could find was at http://www.idotpc.com/ for ~$500. They specialize in mini-ITX systems so the systems don't draw too much power.
For my home server closet and rack, I found a nifty 5u unit on ebay for about $75; there's a vendor out of LA who sells them for about $40+$35 shipping on a 'buy it now' basis. It's not the best engineered case, but it was also easy to take apart and noise-reduce with massed vinyl and rubber grommets, etc.
:)
Personally, I wanted a rack server for several reasons:
a) more space for hard drives
b) easier to fit in than putting a server on a shelf unit.
c) looks cool, and is easy to cool.
It is still loud, but it's also got 6 hard drives in it, and it's only really loud when it's actively engaged in serving video or storing backups, but not for DNS queries.
Craigslist, if you're near a major market, should have plenty of used units too. Be sure to buy one that takes ATX mobos- it is definitely not worth your time to modify an AT case for ATX. It's easy to put a via or other small mobo in an AT case, though, and that's how I'm building the rack mount for the home theater pc. It'll look close enough to Hal for my purposes.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
For rackmounts, after searching for a place for decent custom rackmounts i finally found this shop:
ABMX.com
Unlike most custom shops they dont totally rape you on component upgrades and they have a wide selection of form factors and options, and anything they dont offer on the site they're pretty open about customizing. And everything if very cleanly laid out and tied down, very professional and its all standard form factor parts. And theyll preload many flavors of linux at minimal cost. No i don't work for them, but they've done me right.
Consider Anysystem.com, where you can get dirt-cheap Sun gear. Check out the Ugly Duckling specials for working systems with cosmetic damage dirt cheap. They sell IBM server stuff, too, but that's pretty much all marked "call for pricing".
Unless you're really strapped for space, you can save a good chunk of money by going with something other than a 1U chassis. 2U costs less than 1U (generally). 3U costs less than 2U, and 4U is generally way cheaper than 3U. 4U is the sweet spot since it's little more than a mid-tower case turned on its side -- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!
There's other reasons to go with a 4U case. You can use standard PSU's in a 4U case. You can use standard PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards in a 4U case (or a 3U in some cases). For 1U or 2U you'll either need low profile cards (2U only) or you'll need a riser card.
Another nice thing about any case bigger than 1U is that you generally don't need any special motherboard. You'll need a special heatsink that blows from the side for a 2U, but 3U and 4U can typically use any old HSF you have laying around.
Now, that being said, I just built four 2U servers for my home rendering studio. This is what I bought:
CASE
Chenbro 2U (PN# 21508B)
This is an excellent server case. It offers eight hot-plug SATA drive slots (SAS is optional). It holds any typical ATX/E-ATX server board. 2U PSU's up to 650W are available.
Motherboard
Tyan Thunder S3992-E dual Socket-1207
I've got four of these, each with two Opteron 2220 CPU's and 8GB of RAM. One of them has an Areca SATA RAID controller running eight 1TB drives as my primary file server. These come with dual Gigabit Ethernet links and a single 10/100 link.
Good luck!
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Although I tend to go with them at work, I've been happy with Penguin Computing, and their prices are reasonable enough that they'd be good for home use too.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Newegg always has rackmount chassis and such available. I've never ordered that stuff from them so I can't vouch for any of it, but I've priced it out for comparison purposes before.
Dell will also sell rackmount servers to individuals. I'm not horribly impressed with their servers, but I'm forced to use them because my employer contracts with them and unless there are some very, very big exceptions, we buy all of our hardware through them. Ironically the prices listed for home users are often a lot higher than the prices listed for businesses because they start the business systems at higher base specs, but even with that aside they'll (much like a car dealer) start the list price high and then work it down through negotiations to make you feel like you're getting a better deal.
Given what I've seen comparison pricing though, if I were to build my own rackmount system, I'd almost certainly assemble it from parts from somewhere like Newegg. I'll admit though that while I favor 1U units for most everything except database servers (where I generally want to stuff in more drives than a 1U can handle for redundancy), I'd probably go with at least a 2U case if I were building it myself. Just more room for the system to breath, which is important when using commodity parts that weren't necessarily designed with a tiny little enclosure in mind.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I would get an HP DL360 series machine off eBay, at whatever generation you happen to need (G2 should be OK given your specs.) They are quite inexpensive by now, *very* well built, and remote-manageable. The downside is they take only SCSI disks, which would be a problem if you need more than a few tens of gigabytes of storage, but if you can spare a second U you can buy an inexpensive eSATA enclosure and put in an eSATA card in the machine.
I recommend getting IBM xSeries servers off eBay. Most of the ones you find are returned leases which have been checked out and re-sold. I've personally purchased three x330 eServers (1U/2xP3 1G+/2GB memroy, etc..) for $100 each and have seen many x345's (2U/2xXeon) for as low as $350.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to put a rack in my house, and several rackable systems most likely of the Apple - Xserve variety (definitely not low power).
In the past year however I have dumped the over sized, excessively power hungry gray box servers for an Intel based Apple - Mac mini, only a 110W power supply. Then opted for a couple of external SATA drive enclosures for additional storage, the power bricks / wall warts used for the external drive enclosures are low wattage (though I do not have the numbers for them at the time of this posting.)
Net result, likely similar overall foot print, though the Mac mini is a little taller than 1u.
When the original G4 Mac mini was really wanted a Mac mini just so it could sit on top of my PowerMac G5, cause it would look cool. However after the time it took to finally purchase a Mac mini, I ended up using it to off-load the background server processes I had setup on the client version of Mac OS X, and not have to worry about the services impacting video editing and other processes in the foreground. Also I had chose to place it in my stereo rack, and use it as a media center to play back DivX, XviD, and other video types.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
eBay is your friend, as is google. :)
Seriously, I've found many sources for inexpensive rackmount chassis online. Often you get what you pay for, of course, but places like "rackbuy.com" have some great deals on generic ATX rackmount chassis that will probably be good enough. I have several of the 3U chassis, and I think they're great. They're just tall enough to support a standard ATX power supply and full upright cards instead of using a PCI riser board or some-such. (one caveat-- don't buy anything electronic from rackbuy.com, such as power supplies, KVMs, etc... bad experiences on 100% of those!)
Most of these sorts of chassis will support 80mm or larger fans, which of course can be run relatively quietly, just like your desktop.
People put a lot of emphasis on 1U servers, but unless you're really pressed for space, why bother? Those high-RPM 40mm fans are ridiculously noisy. And when parts fail, you need specialized 1U replacements, such as low-profile heatsinks and CPU fans, and 1U power supplies.
Just get something bigger that will take 100% standard ATX components.
I have not lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere!
First, if you're looking for inexpensive rack-mounted servers, check geeks.com which sells several machines of recent vintage.
However, you might consider this idea. I decided to be more flexible for my own home after observing a small dotcom that acquired several smaller dotcoms, some of which used towers and others that used rack mounted machines.
I opted to install a two-post rack, the kind some people call "relay racks," and I installed shelves on them. The shelves allow me to install whatever computer I want, whether rack-mounted or tower configuration. They also allow me to use non-rack-mount communications gear like routers and modems. I also have punch-down blocks at the top for cabling and power hanging off the side. Naturally your four-post 19-inch rack would have similar if not somewhat less expensive shelving available for it.
Back to my setup, the all-aluminum two-post rack came from American Power Conversion and only cost me $150.
The shelves vary from $35 to $70 each. The shelves holding the smaller gear are cantilevered and vented. The rest are center-mounted.
For your rack you can use your old rack-mounted computer as a shelf for the other components.
There shouldn't be a reason to restrict your options to just rack-mounted computers. The more flexible and less expensive tower form factors are definitely going to satisfy you more.
Kriston
First you need a rack. I got my rack at the local used computer equipment store in Seattle, RE-PC. Got a 75U rack for $75. Didn't need that much U space, but allows for further expansion. 45U takes as much floor space as 12U!
Next you need cases. I got 4U cases. There are lots around. As others have mentioned, 4U cases allow you to use any standard hardware.
Next you need slide rails. Search for "rack mount slide rails" on eBay. I bought from ArrowMax for $18, plus shipping. The shipping is expensive, so buy all the rails you will need at once. Rails work just fine.
Since I use 4U cases, almost any motherboard will work. I had to search to find a commodity motherboard that supports ECC memory. They don't tend to say that in the descriptions for non-server motherboards on NewEgg, so you have to look in the downloaded manual for a BIOS setting that allows you to turn on ECC support. I wouldn't run a server without ECC memory.
Many KVM's are rack mountable already--you want the little L shaped mounting brackets. Don't need a KVM for a single server, of course. Also bought 24 port network switch at RE-PC for cheap. Works just fine. Use a small keyboard and minimal LCD screen.
I'm really happy with my rack. All blinken-lighten and all.
I've run a home server of one kind or another since the early nineties. But, because of having to move, I reconsidered why I wanted one, and decided that using a hosting service was more cost effective(money AND time) for a 24/7 server. Not having to maintain the hardware/software, deal with the heat and noise issues made it an easy choice for me. When I was learning it was helpful to have my own server to monkey with, but, now that I'm beyond that, I let someone else do that work. For local file servers NAS servers are cheap, quiet, and low power. They can be tucked away in a closet or cupboard and ignored for the most part.
Tom.
I've spent the last couple of weeks searching in Google, with 1U and various search terms like Taiwan, China, Ubuntu, Linux, etc.
Google doesn't have an informed opinion about what I'm searching for, and doesn't really give me any of the options I've even seen posted in these responses.
I grant you, I'd get some sort of answer from Google, but not necessarily a good one.
Take a look here at what The Computer Geeks has available for servers. One of the listings is for a new 1U Pentium IV server w/ 1GB RAM & 120 GB HD for $320. Add a second 120 GB HD for $50 and a slimline combo optical drive for $25, and you have a basic 1U server for about $400.
If you really don't want to just swap out the guts, I bought one off ebay several years ago. Mine happened to be from Berkeley Communications, but any high volume refurbisher or reseller with a clean record who resells good, working gear, probably has a deal for you.
There are many joys to running a server in meatspace. As recently as 2001, I was able to see and touch the machines for which I was responsible as a system administrator. After going through the dotcom thing, I've been independent since 2002, and have been able to stay self-sufficient with a
very small capacity since then. In 2002, I had 3 servers connected to a DSL line at home, as you do now. You have to balance the costs involved
versus the benefits you will get back.
I started using dedicated servers with month-to-month arrangements starting in 2003, and have never looked back. I still have a test server
in my apartment that is connected to the net via a cable modem (port 80 blocked, no static IP) and I have a server with a static IP and port 80
visible on a DSL line at the office of a customer, I run his DSL server in return for a free spot for my server.
I've looked at VPSs, but I find that they do not really give you enough storage or RAM for the money, and are slow relative to real hardware. I wouldn't try to run serious production
on a DSL line, but if you are happy with the server, good for you.
Before you spend any money on new hardware, consider this: I just arranged to lease a dual core (AMD X2 2.2) with 2GB RAM, a 250GB hard drive, 100Mbps connection, 3TB/mo., 5 IPs, for $70 one-time and $65/mo., no contract. So bear those numbers in mind as you consider the business case
for investing in new hardware.
My suggestion: don't spend anything on new hardware on your home server. Use it as a test server, use it for your worst experiments before you apply them to your real, "production" server, which should be a dedicated you lease month-to-month.
If you already have a static IP address on your home server, then you'll have a 2-server farm, enough to run your own pair
of DNSs and with the ability to have timed rsync offsite backups from each server to the other.
There you go - $600 or so and you have a totally silent "home server". If all you're going to do is gut a Mac mini and add components, get a POS laptop off eBay instead. Same thing, no Mac markup.
Then, unless you've got a blistering need to fit it into a rack, consider either a small PC (Compaq Deskpro EN comes to mind) or a Mac mini (with an external HDD, I guess.) The Mini in particular is low power, low heat, low noise. I've had one in my bedroom doing hosting duties since February '05. Before that, it was a Compaq Deskpro EN SFF for a few years.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
...has some core2duo mobile based 1U barebones with room for a CF card, two SATA HDDs and "enough" memory, which make almost no noise at all unless under heavy load, and even then probably a lot less than your current box.
/Eirik
I use them for firewalling, and they are teh sweet, with 2 gigabit and 1 FE intel NIC onboard.
Love over Gold.
Most likely not as silent. The mac mini is surprisingly silent compared to all laptops I've ever used.
I recommend an SGI server :
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/
They start with the minimal specs you quote (I think) and they tend to scale quite well, so I'm lead to believe, in case you increase the size of your family and/or circle of friends...and they start at a very reasonable price, I'm sure.
Max.
I've had a lot of servers running on mini-itx boards. Like yourself, I've no need for anything really powerful.
The Travla C146 and C147 cases are fantastic. If you need a system with a few PCI cards, go for the C146, if you don't need any expansion, the C147 will hold two mini-itx motherboards and disks, all in 1U of space.
The benefits are low space consumption and low power too. They aren't very deep either so can fit in a small size rack, unlike a lot of off the shelf servers from the big companies.
Darren.
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
Nothing beats using an Ikea filing cabinet as a super cool / super cheap cabinet.
Buy a case like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219015
This way you only buy the case once and you will always be able to upgrade it. Then you can buy inexpensive desktop parts for way more performance than you need.
If your CPU horsepower needs aren't massive, Mini-ITX is the way to go. I've recently put together 1U devices for a firewall and a general purpose/file server, and an Asterisk box is on the way. It's hard to beat this form factor for low power consumption, which of course translates into less heat and less noise. The downside is usually cost--Mini-ITX motherboards tend to carry a price premium over their larger counterparts, as do the mobile CPUs which often go with them.
:-)
Cases aren't hard to come by; the SuperMicro cases recommended by others seem nice, and while not designed around the Mini-ITX form factor, will probably work nicely with such motherboards. However, I've found that iDOTpc (http://www.idotpc.com) has some nice and (relatively) inexpensive 1U rackmount cases in 8", 12" and 16" depth at very reasonable prices. The 8" and 16" models can be configured without a power supply if you intend to provide your own (as some Mini-ITX boards include onboard DC converters and use an external brick).
Then you just need to choose a motherboard that fits your needs. For the firewall I used a PC Engines ALIX.2C3, which is actually not Mini-ITX form factor (it's slightly smaller), but which fit in the aforementioned iDOTpc 8" case with little modification (I had to add some standoffs at appropriate locations and cut up a generic I/O backplate). There are several models in the ALIX family--with varying amounts of network ports, mini-PCI slots, etc.--all of which consume 5-6 watts of power when active. (Incidentally I got mine from Mini-Box.com, http://www.mini-box.com).
On the other end of the power spectrum, there are boards that can use mobile dual-core processors from Intel or AMD. I went with an AOpen i945GTt-VFA, which is an Intel Socket M board, into which I installed a 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo. Coupled with a pair of SATA drives in iDOTpc's 16" case, the system uses about 40W when idle and perhaps 50W under load. Of course this doesn't run fanless; in addition to the CPU fan there are two case fans (also supplied by iDOTpc) rated at 24.0dBA. The system is still very quiet, especially since the fan speeds vary with the system temperature. Incidentally I procured the i945GTt-VFA from Logic Supply (http://www.logicsupply.com), although they don't stock this particular board anymore.
There are plenty of other Mini-ITX boards to choose from, with varying amounts of CPU power, I/O capability, power consumption and of course price tags. The most common suppliers seem to be VIA, Jetway and MSI (and even Intel, which offers a very inexpensive board, which unfortunately isn't suitable for 1U installations). And Intel Atom-based motherboards are (hopefully) just around the corner; it will be interesting to see what sort of performance-per-watt they will provide.
Finally, don't let anyone tell you that you shouldn't use a rackmount form factor. Sure, it might end up costing a little more than using desktop parts, but there's a certain elegance about it. It usually doesn't make sense to drive old British sports cars, either, but I'm sure those that do, understand.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Have you considered getting a grid server subscription?
For $20 per month you can get a MediaTemple grid server account.
You would have a lower up front cost, better performance and reliability, a quieter room, and be reducing your carbon footprint.