Energy Efficient and Cheap Servers for Home Use?

CapnRob asks: "I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network in the (small) apartment we're now living in. We'd like to set up a firewall/mail server/small-file-server, but all the machines we own right now are pretty big machines that pull a fair amount of power, and that we don't want to keep running 24/7. Since our mail and file server needs are pretty low, our ideal box would be something like a Linksys WRT45G with one of the open source firmwares ... if only you could add a small hard drive to it. We're both long-time FreeBSD users, so installing a *nix system is no big deal, but what I've found so far in this line needs more l337 soldering iron skillz than I've got. Any suggestions for tiny little cheap boxes that won't send our power bills into orbit?"

SparcStation IPX

SparcStation IPX [obsolyte.com] (or even IPC) I ran one of these clever little buggers for a few years, very low on power, quiet as a churchmouse and houses one harddrive (but at todays disk sizes that's plenty) the architecture is pretty fast and 64MB of RAM was more than adequate. You can pick these little beasties up on eBay for next to nothing so spare parts shouldn't be a problem, either (I actually bought a second for spares.) I was running RedHat 6.1 for months at a time without a hiccup.

Obsolyte!

As the owner of http://www.obsolyte.com, which is running on one of these little boxes, I'd like to thank you for slashdotting my poor little server into the ground... However, I guess it's good test for the server to see if it can withstand it -- if it can, than I guess that's the box they are looking for in the "ask slashdot"....

Re:Obsolyte!

As a concerned Slashdot reader - here's a Coral cache link for the page in question:

SparcStation IPX [nyud.net]

Re:SparcStation IPX

There's some problems with the IPX that should make you think twice before considering it.

1) CPU speed: The CPU in a Sparc IPX is slow. We're talking a MicroSPARC at 40MHz. Even running basic applications in a shell, it feels like slogging through mud. I have a SparcStation classic, which uses a MicroSPARC at 50MHz (slightly faster) and it's pure torture, especially when you fire up gcc to compile something.

2) Bus speed: The 20MHz SBUS can barely support 10Mbps ethernet at full speed. I put an hme 100Mbps adapter in my SparcClassic and couldn't push more than about 12Mbps through it with large packets. It absolutely choked with smaller ones. The system also adds about 4ms of latency to any packet going through it, in my experience. Again, this is the slightly faster SparcClassic, not even an IPX! If you have a really fast (3Mbps or greater) DSL connection, you may lose out on performance because of this.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fun as hell box to play with, and you can get them to network boot and run off a serial console, but they're just plain torture for doing real work. Even a PCI-bus 486 is loads faster.

-Z

Soekris is what you want.

Soekris [soekris.com] boxes are exactly what you're looking for. They're cheap, stable, low power, interface-rich and run FreeBSD like a dream. They're super boxes.

Re:Soekris is what you want.

You can easily run the Pebble Linux [nycwireless.net] distro on these. The easy way is to mount a CF card on a Linux box and build a bootable filesystem there. The Pebble docs [nycwireless.net] walk you through it, piece of cake.

Since you can get 1 GB flash cards for pretty cheap, and Pebble even with added bells & whistles fits handily in 256 MB, you can run dead silent. No fans, no water cooling. Power consumption is somewhere south of 10 watts according to the soekris docs.

Of course, if you are running a mail server and/or web server, you might want an actual hard disk to be able to have many read/write cycles without destroying your CF card - you can use a microdrive CF form factor disk with no problem.

My understanding is that Soekris' support for *BSD is better than for Linux, but I've had no problem running Pebble on mine.

Boxes too...

This PDF [soekris.com] is the manual for the bare-bones Soekris 4501 - the first page has pictures of the bare board and the "box" version. It is a router/hub form factor.

whoa!

You found a BSD chick? roxxor!

Re:whoa!

You found a BSD chick? roxxor!

I happen to know there are some BSD chix out there. They like Star Trek, Star Wars, computer games, Dungeons and Dragons, and love wild sex. Unfortunately 90% of them are five foot two and weigh in at 250 pounds.

Re:whoa!

Hilarious...the parent is modded as "Informative"...like some person with mod points was reading through the posts, saw that one, and thought "Hm, I didn't know the BSD chix weighed in at 250. Next time I see h0tti3BSDbab3 online, I'll know not to flirt with her anymore, because I like my women thin".

Just do what I do

Move into an apartment with utilities included.

AC 24/7, free electricity... It's like a server farm in here.

Is this what you're looking for?

http://www.mini-itx.com/

Re:Is this what you're looking for?

I'm drawing less than 35 watts with one of those. The harddrive takes most of the power. You won't get less than that, and 35 watts is basically less than a normal lightbulb.

Try to get a setup that requires no fans.

Mini-ITX variety

Mini-box [mini-box.com] make some neato little ITX boxes which you could hook up to any number of storage solutions. Past that, I've had good success with Mini-ITX [mini-itx.com] boards. I get the cases from Web-tronics [web-tronics.com], as the MITX ones are very, very expensive -- they're meant to make your MITX look like a CD player, pretty much, and I can do more without having to worry about cosmetics. MiniBox (above) sells snap-in MITX power supplies ranging from 60w to 200w. For the extra cool factor, use a Xenarc [xenarc.com] display or use something 'headless', e.g., LCDProc and Crystalfontz [crystalfontz.com]. (As I remember, the MiniBoxes come with their own little displays.)

How about a used laptop?

A used laptop might do what you want. You don't need an awful lot of power. If a laptop HDD is large enough for your storage needs, then look for a cheap used laptop on e-bay.

Laptops are generally very efficient on power. And they come with their own screen too. In fact, I heard of one company that replaced all of it's desktops with Thinkpads and used power as the single justification (the computer takes less, the monitor takes less, and less heat generated requires less AC).

Old laptops...

I have several old laptops that I current run as servers. It seems that it is quite common for old laptop batteries to die and refuse to hold a charge. Suddenly, they become pretty decent servers if you set them up to remain running with the top closed.

I suspect that you will find a few of these 'battery-less' laptop on ebay for a good price as the lack of mobility will really effect the asking price for a laptop. Snap them up and get all the cheap servers you will ever need.

None of us believe you

I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network in the (small) apartment we're now living in. We'd like to set up a firewall/mail server/small-file-server ....

Dude, honestly, none of us believe you. You should have included a link to your marriage certificate and a picture of yourselves. People posting articles on Slashdot aren't married.

Besides, you just got married, and your interested in the network ?????

Old Laptop, two pcmcia net cards

Brother in law gave me an old gateway Pentium MMX 133, 32 mb ram, 4 gb HD. Put two pcmcia net cards in it, and put OpenBSD running PF. Perfect.

Since you like Linksys

How about the NSLU2?

It has been covered before on Slashdot [slashdot.org] and is hackable [tomsnetworking.com] just like the router you mentioned.

Old Laptop (aka a "california server")

Get an older laptop, put a PCMCIA or USB ethernet to give you a second ethernet (connect that to the DSL/Cablemodem uplink).

Low power: Obviously, laptops have to be low power.

Low space: Laptops are small. Disable the "I've closed the lid" switch or get the *nix install to ignore it, fold it up, and slide it away.

Low cost: I said OLD laptop.

Built in UPS: Why do you think its called a "California Server"?

Openbrick

Greetings:
http://openbrick.org/ [openbrick.org] is a community of folks doing this kind of stuff. I have purchased a couple of boxes from a US distributor (http://www.hacom.net/ [hacom.net] and have been really happy. They have 3 ethernet ports, so they make great firewalls. We use CF cards for storage because we don't need the storage, but you can put little laptop harddrives in them, so you could make a file/print box if you wanted to. They'll boot off of a USB CD, so installation is a breeze. I run Debian, but have installed openbsd for kicks, also. They're cool enough that they don't need an internal fan, so they're quiet too.
I have nothing but nice things to say about them. The US distributor only takes paypal, but he has always delivered without problems. He even called back to see if I liked it.

Two Things

1) Do a search for the power requirements of a modern computer (any time after the invention of APM). There are plenty of studies to be found, many of them at university websites. The average computer, when it is in standby mode, uses 35W or less. When an EPA Green monitor (almost every modern monitor on Earth) is in sleep mode they use less than 1W. So, you are trying to figure out how to use less electricity than the equivalent of a small nightlight? The first time you leave your electric oven on 350 degrees for about one minute longer than your buzzer went off (assuming it is heating at the time), you most likely just spent more electrical energy than an entire month of computer server usage on full power.

2) Why are you trying to jack around buying proprietary solutions or exotic mini-computers for your needs? That's dumb as hell. My personal server at home is an old Dell P233 laptop I bought for $50. It sports 80MB of RAM, 100Mbit ethernet, and a 4GB HDD. It currently runs my Apache HTTP, SAMBA, SSHD, VNC, Postfix, and CUPS server and it is tucked away neatly on a shelf under my desk. It has been especially useful as my print server (since I have a wireless network) and MP3 SAMBA server. Power consumption? Please, this is a laptop and the power features have worked perfectly as they were intended to. Also, there has been no additional configuration with this system since its original installation outside of Linux OS security/bug/OS upgrades.

Separate your firewall from your servers

"We'd like to set up a firewall/mail server/small-file-server..."

IMHO, putting all your servers on your firewall is just asking for trouble. For better security, you'd do best to have one of those Linksys firewall/routers separate from your mail/file/blah-blah server.

Re:Mini ITX and CF

Flash memory isn't a good storage solution for a mail server. If you've got any sort of traffic volume, you'll wear out the memory in a year or so.

Re:Mini ITX and CF

memory, daemon, spin up disk, cronjob ? jebus your cool. It only took you about 10 seconds to revinvent a shitty vfs layer in userspace. Shouldnt we just be able to tune the VFS for aggressive cacheing and let that spin up and down the disk as needed. I dont want to get into the softupdates Vs. journel issue, but really thats what you want.