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

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:SparcStation IPX

[nocomment]

OpenBSD runs very nicely on a soekris box.

Soekris

[Mysteray]

Here's a link: Soekris Engineering [soekris.com]
Here's another: an unofficial OpenBSD Sokeris HOWTO [devrandom.ch]

Obsolyte!

[tekrat]

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!

[Spad]

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

SparcStation IPX [nyud.net]

Re:Obsolyte!

[LiquidCoooled]

The thing is, its holding up better and returning faster than most sites under normal load!

I'm definately impressed.

Think I'll go hunting.

Re:Obsolyte!

[sirReal.83.]

Wow, what fools wrote Coral's software? It caches the 503 error page. Talk about defeating the purpose... they totally fail it.

Re:Obsolyte!

[RFC959]

Well, they can run the latest version of OpenBSD at the very least, which should be fine for anything you are likely to do with an IPX. As for Solaris, I would forget about anything past 2.6. It might run, but... I've got one serving as my firewall, running OpenBSD. It's a fine box for what it does; they're built like little tanks. But powerful they are not. Just ssh'ing in raises the load to 0.5.

Re:SparcStation IPX

[ZorinLynx]

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

Re:SparcStation IPX

[ericdano]

Its going to be a mail/file server. I think you don't need a ton of horsepower.......I used to run a fileserver/email server on a dual pentium 166.

Re:SparcStation IPX

[Karzz1]

Its going to be a mail/file server. I think you don't need a ton of horsepower.......

It depends on whether you are planning on doing any mail filtering. I have a bunch of experience with MailScanner [soton.ac.uk] and ClamAV [clamav.net] -- a sendmail server that normally eats 4-5% CPU will quickly start hitting 75% and more. SpamAssassin [apache.org]will add a bunch more to the load. As far as file sharing goes though, you are probably safe.

Re:SparcStation IPX

[bobbozzo]

If he means a mailserver for home use, even with a lot of spam for a few users, CPU usage should be OK.

I'd be a lot more worried about RAM though if the boxes max out at 64mb... the perl version of SpamAssassin uses about 20MB, and if you do AV also, that's another 5-10MB RAM per concurrent connection.

I've had problems with my home server (P5/140MB RAM) freaking when I use fetchmail to d/l my POP3 acct with 10-20 emails; fetchmail hands the messages to sendmail and sendmail tries to process them all at on

Re:SparcStation IPX

[bobbozzo]

What's a 'P5'?

The original Pentium is often referred to as a P5.
PPro/PII/PIII is P6, Pentium4 is P7...
I don't know what they'll call the Pentium 5 if/when it comes out :P

Re:SparcStation IPX

[Paul Jakma]

Its going to be a mail/file server. I think you don't need a ton of horsepower.......

Until you try run Spamassassin and Clamav to filter spam and windows-virus-cruddage and wonder why email takes days to arrive...

DEC Multia's

[Moekandu]

They're tiny (13x13x3 in), you can get them dirt cheap in both Pentium and Alpha flavors (100 - 166Mhz range) and just about any *nix distro will support them.

They're basically the predecessor to the SFF boxen. Just don't lay the Alpha Multia's flat or one of the chips on the underside of the motherboard will overheat and die. But, then again, there are detailed instructions on the NetBSD website on how to use those l33t soldering skills to fix it.

Soekris is what you want.

[Nugget]

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.

[douglips]

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.

Re:Soekris is what you want.

[metlin]

Wow, thanks! I've been looking for something similar too, and their net4801 [soekris.com] seems really nice and compact - and $250 isn't all that too much, either.

Do you know of anything similar for a webserver, something like a compact off the shelf thing running either *BSD/Linux? I guess I could always solder in a hard-drive onto the 4801 (since the website says that they do have both CompactFlash Type I/II socket and UltraDMA 33 int.) - but one that comes built in with something like that would be cool.

Most of the

Re:Soekris is what you want.

[Raleel]

I can concur on the soekris box. Might I suggest the 4801. 3 ethernet ports, laptop sized harddrive connector on board, compact flash slot, pci slot, and a mini-pci slot. they even sell them with WAN interfaces cards

we use these for wireless/bluetooth sniffers

Re:Soekris is what you want.

[peacefinder]

Agreed. If I can set up OpenBSD on one of these as my second BSD box ever, I'm sure someone with some actual BSD experience can do it easily.

I would imagine you can

[Sycraft-fu]

M0n0wall Is BSD, albeit of the Free variety, and it was more or less designed for one of these things.

Re:Soekris is what you want.

[blixel]

Soekris boxes are exactly what you're looking for.

I'll second that. I bought one of these about 6 months ago and it has been amazing. I plan on getting at least one more so I can have a highly customizable WAP.

Check my little tutorial [davidcourtney.org] for more info. (Several pictures included.)

Boxes too...

[douglips]

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.

Re:Soekris is what you want.

[epine]

New item today on
The Wedgie [theregister.co.uk] that the VIA Esther C5J has now been branded as the C7. This core has accelerated instructions for AES, RSA, hardware entropy, and various SHA standards. It should run fanless at around 1GHz and outperform a P4 as a cypto NAT firewall.

http://www.monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0402/ ms g00112.html

Once upon a time Theo de Raadt wrote:

>Got a couple figures on AES performance... the cool one at the bottom.
>
>type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 by

whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

You found a BSD chick? roxxor!

Re:whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

[UranusReallyHertz]

geeky, smart, hot. Choose any two.

Re:whoa!

[shut_up_man]

I'm sorry, but the correct reference is:
Smart, hot, sane. Choose any two.

Re:whoa!

[babyrat]

ummmm no - we were talking about women - sane doesn't apply. :)

Re:whoa!

[uberdave]

If they're hot+smart, they're clever enough not to get entagled with any of us.

Re:whoa!

[uberdave]

Sorry. My N key is fiicky.

Re:whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

Beg to differ. Mine is young, tall, thin, hot, funny, technical (computer security no less) and pulls down big bucks.

Has she noticed you following her yet?

Re:whoa!

[amide_one]

> pulls down big bucks.

Bare-handed? or does she hunt the deer with dogs? :)

Re:whoa!

[kevman42]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Move into an apartment with utilities included.

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

I did that once

[EvilStein]

The maintenance people said that they were afraid I was a fire hazard!

Damn, I should have kept that apartment. Heh.

Re:Just do what I do

[bobbozzo]

Our electricity isn't included, but water is... so we hooked a generator to the tap and let the water flow freely.

Then you should be able to have free watercooling too!

Mini ITX and CF

[gbulmash]

Saw a story at a home recording enthusiast site (sorry that I don't recall which) about using a Mini ITX mobo and a flash memory card instead of a HDD (I think they put knoppix on a 1gb CF) for a low-power, low-heat, nearly no noise solution for a recording studio.

I guess the same solution would work for a low power home firewall & mail server, and have the added advantage of being really nice and quiet too.

You could possibly sub a low power laptop HDD if you needed more storage space.

Just a thought.

Re:Mini ITX and CF

[Carnildo]

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

[Abalamahalamatandra]

Bollocks. Just do what I did - build a nice little Mini-ITX system, put in a gig of RAM and load up Linux with a custom initrd that extracts the system to a ramdisk and pivot_roots to it. Mount the drive for storage, then use hdparm to tell it to power down when idle.

Then write a daemon to watch when the drive is spun up, and copy the mailboxes off to a storage area on the drive. Use rc.local to copy them back when the system reboots.

Voila - low power (max 40 watts, usually less because the drive isn't

Re:Mini ITX and CF

[sPaKr]

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.

Re:Mini ITX and CF

[bobbozzo]

Linux 2.6.6 and above kernels have a "Laptop Mode" which will only spin up the disk when necessary (read needed, or write buffers full).

It's a sysctl variable...
echo "1" > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode

There's apparently also a userspace version if you don't want to upgrade your kernel.
Google [google.com] has info on using both.

Re:Mini ITX and CF

[kwiqsilver]

I second the mini itx idea (not sure about the CF). I have a Via Epia 533MHz box that works great for that kind of stuff.
It's only 20 or 30 watts, and the only moving parts are a small, quiet fan and the hard drive (get an old 5400rpm drive for even less noise/power).

Is this what you're looking for?

[fatjesus]

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

Re:Is this what you're looking for?

[Bombcar]

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.

Old computers

[Carnildo]

I'm using an old P233 box as a server. It's not exactly a small box, but it doesn't draw much power. If you want a small form factor as well, look into VIA C3-based computers.

Slashdot

[couldntthinkupagoodn]

If you're planning on making the file server accessable from online, whatever you do, don't post the link. I've never heard of a slashdotted house before, but I can't imagine how hard it would be.

Via Motherboard

[bluewee]

I am using a Syntax Via 1200+ [syntaxusa.com] Motherboard with CPU From TigerDirect when they were having a sale(I came to 10$USD, I grabbed a small MicroATX case from NewEgg and it works beautifully, and is small and quiet. It kinda takes a while to emerge everything, yeah Gentoo user here :D. but it works great and does not use much power.

Mini-ITX variety

[captnitro]

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?

[Darth Muffin]

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).

Re:How about a used laptop?

[Stevyn]

Not a bad idea, but laptops don't like to be left on 24 hours a day. I would know. I have a dell inspiron 8200 and I keep this thing running all the time. I'm also on my third hard drive. I just keep the operating systems and programs on the laptop drive and all other data is on the external firewire drive. If you could get a USB drive that was powered by the laptop, that might be a safer solution.

This is a good power saving alternative to a huge desktop, but I wouldn't trust my data to a laptop hard drive.

Old laptops...

[D-Cypell]

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.

Re:Old laptops...

[K8Fan]

Laptops with broken displays are even better. I have an old P3 laptop I use as a server, and I got it free. Sony charges $600 for ANY display repair, so it's literally not worth fixing. But the VGA output works fine, and I have it set up through a KVM switch. Viola! A 75 watt server. Tiny hard drive, but if it becomes a problem, I can just do externals.

I'm thinking of taking the whole display off, thus making sure the lamps never come on, thereby reducing power drain even more.

Re:Old laptops...

[mmurphy000]

This brings up an interesting point -- anybody know of a site that lists laptop models that can run with the lid closed? For example, I have an HP Pavilion zt1125 that I suspect won't run closed.

Also, anybody have suggestions for heat dissipation? I've heard horror stories (some posted here at /.) about laptops overheating with the lid closed.

Re:Old laptops...

[LurkerXXX]

Buy laptops with broken screens and just rip off the top. You can hook the back VGA port up to any external monitor you have around whenever you actually need a head on the machine.

Re:Old laptops...

[kzinti]

This brings up an interesting point -- anybody know of a site that lists laptop models that can run with the lid closed?

Are there really any that won't? I've used linux on four different laptops - an ancient Toshiba, a slightly newer Compaq, a Dell Inspiron made five years ago, and a Sony Vaio I bought this year. All of them would run with the lid closed, given the right BIOS setting. Getting into the BIOS is not always obvious, but that's another story...

None of us believe you

[mark*workfire]

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 ?????

Re:None of us believe you

[Just Some Guy]

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

Hell yeah! When I first married, I didn't think about anything other than sockets for months. Now I mostly yearn for the days with a fat pipe in promiscuous mode. At least I'm hooked up with thin-net, unlike some of my old peers.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:None of us believe you

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

There's 0x10 kinds of people in the world: those who know hex, and 15 other kinds..

Netwinder

[FatRatBastard]

Don't think you can buy them new (at least cheaply) but look for an old Netwinder. I got one on eBay a couple of years ago for abougt $150. Low power, two ethernet ports, easy to manage and small. Not a barn burner by any means, but for a firewall / file server / print server it works perfect.

Old Laptop, two pcmcia net cards

[Saint Stephen]

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

[kbahey]

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")

[nweaver]

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

[Scottaroo]

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.

Re:Openbrick

[fiddlesticks]

>I run Debian, but have installed openbsd for kicks, also.

I really love /. sometimes.

my friends and colleagues *dread* (re)installing OSs ('upgrading windows' or 'moving to OSX'), preparing for months, canvasing advice, backing *everything* up (the OS they are getting rid of, for example), *taking the afternoon off* to do so, ringing me as they do it, etc etc etc

here, people install openbsd 'for kicks' on weird 'old' computers

that's why i love slash

ps, i want an openbrick :)

Re:Openbrick

[bobbozzo]

This seems expensive (300-400 euros).

How is the performance of the Geode CPU?

I've seen some VIA C3 boards with 3-4 Nics here [lex.com.tw].

They have a US Distributor here [synertrontech.com].
I talked to them in June; with case, motherboard w 4 RealTek nics and the fastest CPU it was $370.

Here [commell.com.tw] is another one with 4 nics.

I'd be using it to run Astaro firewall, which is kind of a pig for CPU and RAM.

If you only need 1 NIC, LOTS of Mini-ITX VIA systems are available for under $200 with case, mb, CPU.
Their power consumption is supposed to

Two Things

[Listen Up]

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.

Re:Two Things

[Tim C]

The average computer, when it is in standby mode, uses 35W or less.

That's good to know, but what use is a server if it's in standby mode?

The guy said he wants something on 24/7 - that to me implies accessible, especially as he mentions using it as a mail server.

Re:Two Things

[Listen Up]

That's a good point, but how much power does a laptop use when on 24/7? My laptop can go for 3 hours a single battery. I would assume that even having a laptop on 24/7 would use very little energy. Plus, the most power is being consumed by your monitor and your hard drive. When the monitor is off (or closed and off for a laptop) and the hard drive is in spin-down/suspend, how much energy is really being used? That wattage was in the 10-15W range and a lot of the times is was just residual energy usage.

Re:Two Things

[moonbender]

Yep, a night light rated at 40W would be brighter than my normal bedside lamp. And of course, it'd draw about 2 to 3 times the power any decent power saving light bulb (as opposed to an incandescent one) would.

Actually, that reminds me: If you're looking for power savings like the guy who requested this Ask Slashdot, have a look at replacing your lighting solutions. Incandescent lights not only have a really terrible efficiency, but also have to be replaced than good power saving light bulbs. Night lights

Re:Two Things

[Alioth]

I'd love to replace all my light bulbs with high-efficiency ones - but all my lights are on dimmer switches. The day I can get a reasonably priced energy efficient lamp that works with a dimmer I will though.

routerboard

[Feyr]

http://www.routerboard.com

(no i won't make a goddaned link)

while designed to act as a router, this thing has a 233 mhz, intel compatible cpu, can eat up to 512 megs of ram, and works off a flash disk.

it has 2 ethernet ports (100mbits), and a USB one. i'm using one as my core router (for an ISP) and it's just a charm :) add an usb external hard drive (not sure if it has usb2, i dont use it) and you're good to go

WRT54GS

[chopkins1]

I have seen at least one of the SVEASOFT (experimental) distributions that has a way for the WRT54G(S) to NFS mount a hard drive. Hope this helps.

An old Mac

[Jesrad]

Seriously. An old iMac of the DV series is perfect for this, except maybe for the footprint, it's bigger than a mini-ITX BSD box. Fanless so it's very silent, low power requirement, runs MacOS X or Linux or BSD. Just set it to disable the screen after one minute of inactivity for even lower power needs.

Plus it doubles as an MP3 jukebox (the Harman Kardon speakers are better than their looks would lead one to think), and with a eyeTV plugged on the FireWire, it can also replace a Tivo. You can get one cheap on Ebay or through LowEndMac [lowendmac.com].

Re:An old Mac

[gozar]

Unfortunately, these iMac's never turn off the screen. They cool by convection, with the heat of the monitor tube causing the air in the iMac to rise bringing in cool air underneath. You can set it to turn off the screen, but this will only blank it, not shut it down.

You'll either want an older iMac (tray loading, not slot loading) or a G4 cube.

Re:An old Mac

[Jesrad]

Yes, technically, the screen goes in sleep mode instead of shutting down. It consumes a LOT less energy this way (somewhere along 1 W I'm told). That's why this setting is under the Energy Savings preferences ;)

The major sources of heat in my iMac DV are the hard drive, the processor and the power supply (these last two having passive heat radiators), I don't really know about the monitor tube running hot or not.

Separate your firewall from your servers

[Bun]

"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.

nah, no big deal.

[twitter]

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.

You can do this reasonably. You should have all of your stuff backed up regardless of where you put it. Email and file serving are not security problems, especially if file service is done through ssh. While it may be better to port forward to other computers to share the load and risk, the low effort an

Re:Separate your firewall from your servers

[Stinking Pig]

Bull. Regurgitating general aphorisms blocks true understanding.

This aphorism came about because it is undesirable to have one service hacked leading to access to all the other services and firewall configuration. Okay, this is an understandable situation and goal. Taken to its logical end, it clearly leads to one service per box, which is a good design model for a corporate enterprise with uptime and security as primary design goals.

However, in a home network where service consolidation and low power utilization are the primary design goals, this additional layer of safety bears too high of a cost. Even if the servers are $50 laptops, six or seven of them stacked up are going to be noisy, heat-generating, continually failing little problems. That's probably okay if the goal is to learn how to manage a corporate enterprise, but now we're changing design goals midstream, never a good idea.

With tools like chroot and automatically-handled patch management (urpmi, apt-get, &c), the risk of getting the whole server compromised by one service is reduced, down to what is an acceptable level for many. Once that's understood, we can evaluate the choice of firewall/router packages, and once we're doing that the power and flexibility of netfilter or pf blow any SOHO appliance out of the water. Proper logging, a good set of utilities... appliances are fine for use in networks where no one cares, I suppose, but I don't see why you would want one when a Linux or BSD box could be used instead.

What about a PDA?

[Eldred]

You could probably pick up an older Zaurus (Linux PDA) cheap. The 5500 I have can take both compact flash and SD/MMC Cards, and runs on a fraction of a watt. With a compact flash ethernet card you could connect it to pretty much any router. Just mark it as your DMZ, and the incoming traffic will be routed to it. All you need do is set up a mail server on the Zaurus, maybe a little custom compiling, and you're all set.

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Cerfcube

[linuxwrangler]

I have one of these:
http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/cerfcube /

Add a microdrive for storage. Doesn't win awards for speed, storage or ram but the ~3 inch cube takes nearly no space, looks cool, is silent and draws very little power.

wrt54g + nslu2

[mo]

since you mentioned the wrt54g you might be also interested in the Linksys NSLU2 [batbox.org]. It's got a single ethernet port, dual usb ports and can run linux. Attach a usb harddrive to it and you can use it for your file/mail server. The open source firmwares aren't as polished as, say sveasoft [sveasoft.com] but it seems to me that you're the type that might enjoy getting it working.

I built a mini-itx for around $350

[tungwaiyip]

I was seeking the same thing before. I did some research and found some really cool and small products [tungwaiyip.info]. The problem of being cool is it carries a high price tag.

I endup ordered a mini-itx box from idotpc [idotpc.com]. No hassle, super fast delivery. Cost me around $350 for a 512MB ram 80GB HD system (w/0 CDROM). It ran a small website link above. The best part, my power bill dropped by $10 a month after I turned off the AMD box!!! Now I can brat about helping out in the California energy crisis.

Eventually something should make a webserver the size of iPod. How about $200 for a 40GB version?

think "laptop"

[v1]

Laptops are designed with energy efficiency in mind. In my tests I found that (at least for macintoshes) laptops draw under 40 watts even when running at full tilt, and sip less than 20 watts when relatively idle. You also get a built-in UPS, so you save money and electricity there too. Laptops also don't require a CRT display, saving you another 50 watts or so, plus considerable space savings. If you need additional storage, make sure you get a model with a firewire port on it, or just get one with an 80gb HD if that's enough for you to sprawl on.

Uh... am I way off base here by suggesting...

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

...procuring a used laptop? Low power, and all the creature comforts of a full-fledged computer.

(aside)
But, I have to also say. I have NEVER even MET a woman who has HEARD of bsd. I had to argue with a Comcast Cable woman today who hadn't even heard of FireWire. I considered it a victory when I got my g/f to run Folding@Home. She was even game for Red Hat, but it was too difficult for her to find a wireless driver for the Thinkpad built-in 802.11... but hey, at least she tried!

Here's to... if not geek, then geek-compatible women! love 'em.

Obligatory Mac plug

[FredFnord]

I bought a PowerMac G4 Cube a few months ago to do this. Low power, no noise, and everything I needed was there and mostly set up by default. The firewall needs a bit of tugging on, but, well, such is life. The Windows file sharing works wonderfully.

Plus, I can either lock it in the closet or leave it out on my living room table as a conversation piece. ('What's that? It's cute!' 'Oh, that's my web server.')

-fred

Real computer

[macdaddy]

Don't use a device like a LinkSys or some other device that requires a flash card for storage if you're planning on serving web pages or handling email. Proper handling of email is not simply take the incoming message and write it to disk once. Do you realize that Sendmail writes a transcript file (xf) that exists during the life of a session showing everything that happens during that session? Few people realize that. Spam and AV checking will also likely require at least part of the message to be written to disk prior to scanning. Now you can do a lot of this in memory but the memory in a WRT45G is going to be too limited to have a decent tmpfs partition to handle this.

No offense, but what you need to use is something that's meant to handle the job: a real computer. You can build a low cost, quiet, power conservative computer for not that much money. The average computer consumes less than 100 watts of power when performing basic tasks. This review [techreviewer.com] gives you lots of details. So really the power consumption won't be a problem. Keep the number of internal devices low and you won't have much heat build up. Keep the heat low and you can do all sorts of fancy things with sound panels to absorb sound, thus fixing that problem. You sound like a person that really does need a home server, like myself and my servers. You can't go wrong with a real computer. Plus when something breaks (and of course it will) you have warranties to fall back on. You can also hop on newegg or run down to the corner Crap Shack and buy replacement parts. Try doing that with your jerry-rigged WRT54G. ;-)

Another Mini-ITX vote

[mercuryresearch]

I've seen other suggestions for this, I'll give you my exact configuration. I'm running a DNS, web, mail and firewall services using my setup (off of static IP on ISDN no less, 24/7!)

I use a VIA CL6000 (this is a dual lan motherboard with a 600 MHz fanless "Eden" processor) with slackware, 256MB of memory, and a 40GB laptop hard disk (complete overkill, 8GB would be plenty). Total cost of the system was well under $400. Power consumption is about 25 watts, and the box is completely silent. I omit the optical drive since I just "borrowed" one to do the initial install, everything has been via the network since. Uptime's been great.

I've been tempted by the Soekis stuff as well, but cost wise it looks like it'd be a near wash, maybe just a bit cheaper. The ITX stuff is a "real" PC, so you just fire it up and go, no CF config, console emulation via serial port, etc. (I had previously used a CF card on an earlier VIA server, it works if you make sure you put the right things into a RAM disk first.)

As others have pointed out, a cheap laptop would work, however I found the fact that I wanted firewall service (two E-net ports needed) made things a bit odd, as all the used cheap LTs I had included no network adapters, so it would have been dual PCMCIA or USB ethernet, and it just felt and looked really kludgey when I played with it.

Epia / Mini-ITX

[The_DOD_player]

Is the only way to do this IMO....

I have the exact same in my closet. VIA-Epia Eden 533 MHz motherboard/cpu/network/vga package, fanless, a bit of RAM, a fluid bearing harddrive, Gentoo Linux... it rocks....
- Barely consumes power ~30W
- It's also almost silent.
- It's very cheap.

Re:Epia / Mini-ITX

[merlin_jim]

I'm also a proud Mini-ITX owner. I have the 800 MHz version with a small fan. Got a small 2.5" hard drive used (4 GB). Stick some RAM in there. I put mine in a Cubid 2766 box, which is very compact (it's far smaller in form factor than my VCR) and uses an efficient and quiet 12V DC powersupply; the AC power is rectified outside in a transformer brick that doesn't require active cooling.

Prices (as I recall.... YMMV):

800 Mhz EPIA... $100
128 MB RAM... $40
2.5" 4 GB HDD... $40
16X DVD-ROM drive... $25 (eBay)
mini-adapter for DVD-ROM... $10
Case + DC-DC power supply... $60

for a grand total of... $275. And it can double as a DVD / digital media player.

BTW, I originally modded an acrylic cube to hold the computer. With no prior experience, I built a 7" cube to hold everything. I took it out because the power switches I used were difficult to press. I even used acrylic hinges. You can get just the power supply for $30.

I didn't do it for e-mail though. MythTV baby, so you gotta throw in a $150 hardware capture card to be perfectly fair when quoting the price of my system as-is.

Cobalt Qube

[old_sarge]

You can pick up an old Cobalt Qube on ebay for around $100.

There are howto's - if you dig - for porting FreeBSD to one of these.

They are about 7.5" cubed and draw very little power. I've got 5 of them around the country and they've been going strong for over 5 years.

Shuttle Zen: quiet small-form-factor box

[bfields]

I recently got a shuttle "Zen" st62k (review [silentpcreview.com]), put a 1.8G P4, 1G ram, and a 180G hard drive in it. So it's in a completely different class from something embedded. But it has a fancy heat sink and an external power supply, which means the whole thing needs only one variable-speed fan, which I've never actually heard go above its lowest speed except briefly on startup.

So despite the fact that it's always on, and lives on top of a desk in my living room, I don't really hear it. Very quiet. I haven't measured the energy use, but I suspect it's not bad. My original plan was just to use it as a firewall/personal server, but since it's plenty adequate for a regular desktop, I use it for that now too--it's nice being able to just check the weather or whatever without waiting for something to boot.

So, anyway, I'm pretty happy with it. Recommended.

--Bruce Fields

VIA C3 Mini-ITX and notebook HDD

[gweihir]

If you go for the models mit no more than 667MHz, you get passive cooling. You can get these with up to 2 network interfaces, but one is cheaper and you can put a cheap additional card in the PCI-slot. Just make sure the case you get has a raiser-card. Using a notebook HDD is simpler than CF, since you do not need to worry about writes (CF has a limited number of writes before it breaks). Is also cheaper when you want storage in the GB range. I have made good experience with notebook HDDs from Fujitsu. Very quiet.

Total equipment:
- board
- RAM
- HDD
- Case

The PSU comes with the case. Mine has an external notebook type 12V only PSU and an additional regulator board in the case. What you get is a modern PC that is a little slow (I would say C3-MHz / 2 = Athlon MHz. i.e. a 800MHz C3 feels like a 400MHz Athlon) but completely functional and with everything integrated you are likely to need. Keyboard and monitor required for installation in addition.

I have such a setup running wit a real HDD (also backups on it) for over a year now without problems.

Recall IBM's experience in the 80s

[wombatmobile]

.

IBM tried the same strategy when it introduced MicroChannel architecture [fact-index.com] (MCA) for PS/2 in 1987.

MCA featured technical improvements that were appropriate for the times. Computers were speeding up and the bus was a bottleneck.

The verdict of history?

Although MCA was a huge improvement over ISA, it was limited only to IBM hardware. It was not compatible with either EISA or XT bus architecture so older cards cannot be used with it. This small market made for very high prices, and IBM didn't help matters by charging high licensing fees. MCA was largely ignored, and with the introduction of PCI, MCA swiftly disappeared.

Gotta love Soekris

[SuperQ]

I have a soekris net4501, it uses less than 10watts, and provides most of the services for my house.

with a laptop drive attached, you could get a soekris net4801, and power the thing for around 15watts.

The other great option is to use an old laptop, laptops in general use less than 50 watts when operating.. even less with the LCD turned off.

My thinkpad T21 uses 20 watts with the lid closed, and the disk spinning.

URL: http://www.soekris.com

poor bastard

[FLoWCTRL]

"I just got married, and my wife and I are putting together a home network ... we're now ... We'd like ... we own ... we don't want ... our needs ... our ideal ... We're both ... our ..."

lol!

Translation:

I just got married; I no longer do, like, own, want, need or imagine anything myself. Please help.

Industrial computers do this

[GuyFawkes]

I had a project many years ago to design a computer for racing yachts, they were using laptops and breaking them on a VERY regular basis, thing is these guys are totally anal about weight, on a 40 foot boat they will chuck shit like 2 pint aluminium kettles over the side, so whatever I designed HAD to use fuck all power because they carried minimal traditional 12 volt lead acid and minimal diesel and in any case starting the motor meant a race penalty.

Ideally they were looking for something around 500 mhz, that weighed 2 ounces, was literally bulletproof and waterproof to 1000 feet, the size of a matchbox, and generated enough power to charge the main lead acid battery.

A smart engineer doesn't try to reinvent the wheel (especially for a *potential* customer that isn'y waving a blank cheque book at you) so I went out and bought a 3.5 inch biscuit PC from advantech (do a google) this is a single board PC, literally the size and form factor of a 3.5 inch hard drive, with onboard cyrix 233 mhz cpu, onboard sodimm slot (I used a 68 mb card), onboard gfx and sound, and pc104 expansion (I used 4 of these, one for four rs232/485 ports, one for a gps, one for pcmcia and one for ethernet) I also used a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive, and stuck the whole thing in a case that had an integrated inverter / PSU that would run off anything from 10 volts dc to about 36 volts dc. The whole thing was completely fanless.

Build quality of all these components, being industrial, was excellent, much better than home pc standards. It was also extremely tough and had a very wide enviornmental envelope. Best of all it was cheap, they make so many of these things for point of sale electronics etc that prices are comparable to cheap domestic kit.

For the demo unit (which was fully linux compatible) we ran winders98 to demo the nav software which was also winders based, performance was about what you'd expect from a equivalent mhz laptop, eg more than enough for 95% of uses.

Nearly forgot, being industrial it also had in hardware an automatic reboot thing (which you could disable) which would reboot the whole thing if the OS stopped responding to an internal irq for 15 seconds...

Power consumption of this box was typically 11 watts mean, this was measured by a pukka power meter on the supply line for several hours.

Apart from the 2.5 inch hard disk, it was zero moving parts and therefore near as dammit totally silent too.

My take on this is if a standard obsolete dektop box won't do it look at EPIA, and if EPIA won't do it then look at industrial biscuit PC's.

HTH etc

Re:The obvious?

[Carnildo]

A possible problem with a laptop is fitting two ethernet ports in -- you need two if you're going to use it as a firewall. Older laptops usually don't have built-in ethernet, so you'd need to connect two PCMCIA cards, which might present space difficulties.