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Power Programming Technology

Low-Powered Personal Servers? 119

Posted by Cliff from the less-noise-less-footprint-less-impact dept.
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?"
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Low-Powered Personal Servers? More

Low-Powered Personal Servers?

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  • mini-itx (Score:2, Informative)

    by jotux ( 660112 )
    small, cheap, lower power consumption.

    • Re:mini-itx (Score:5, Informative)

      by woobieman29 ( 593880 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @06:12PM (#13417772)
      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!

      • Also, look on eBay for "intel itx". You can find an Intel D845GVSH, which has a 1GHz Intel Shelton (it's a Banias with 0K L2, but it's roughly as fast as a 1GHz Coppermine), and is slightly larger than Mini-ITX, for around $90 shipped. (Granted, that's to the US. You'll probably find something in Europe, though.)

      • Re:mini-itx (Score:3, Insightful)

        by slaker ( 53818 )
        I don't know what the poster's requirements for fileserving are, but many miniITX solutions have only one IDE port on-board. Granted, these days you can stick a couple 500GB drives on something and call it a day, but that's the thing that keeps me away from it as a platform.

        If the disk subsystem is an issue, I'd suggest something in an Athlon mobile or Athlon64 mobile. Low power, noise and heat, combined with modern and full-featured system boards AND a CPU that's up for real work if need be (and if not, it
      • I'm running an Epia M-II (Nehamiah). I've actually got 3 epia boards (2 servers, one that was intended for the car) and that one's been the coolest so far.
        In includes onboard:
        • Cardreader
        • PCMCIA slot (1)
        • 10/100 Ethernet (VT6102 [Rhine-II])
        • Firewire
        • USB 2.0
        • VIA Nehamiah CPU 1GHz
        • Soundcard (VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97)
        • Video (VT8623 [Apollo CLE266] )

        I've run the Epia machines on DC power units connected to as low as a 40W power brick (total system power including drive, etc). After you get the board, all you

      • I tried this, the EPIA architecture was weak for server use. Linux ran poorly on it, GCC doesn't compile well for the C3, and the quality of the hardware was substandard.

        What I would do is pick up an ancient Power Mac G3 tower (blue and white). It consumes very little power, has only one fan, will run indefinitely, and has 'server-quality' components. Your number one concern with a home server is throughput, and the G3 tower provides it with 64-bit PCI slots, ATA-100, PC-100 RAM, and built-in Fast Ethernet.
    • Get a used laptop off eBay. If you get a P3 with powersaving features and at least a 30GB HD you should be fine. Buy a new battery for it (since the original will probably only hold a 30 minute charge) and presto you've got a server with a built in UPS, low power usage, low heat output and very little power usage. If you're concerned about the HD speed just get a Firewire or USB 2 pcmcia card and run everything on an external drive.
  • I've also been wondering for the same thing. I now was with a long disputed battle to leave on a 30watts 800MHz P3 always on.

    This server is now, my storage server and also acts as a mirror for Fedora Core on their torrent (makes my connection useful).

    So I want to know what slashdotters will suggest!

    • Re:Hey! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @09:30AM (#13420561) Journal
      I've also been wondering for the same thing. I now was with a long disputed battle to leave on a 30watts 800MHz P3 always on.

      Personally, I have two always-on machines... My internet gateway, and my file server (both running Linux). I recently upgraded both from old P3 machines, which suck 30W each just for the CPU, as you mention.

      For my Masq'ing box, I went with an Epia CL 600 and a 512MB CF disk (via a CF to IDE adapter). Won't break any number-crunching records, but it sips a nice 28W, total, at-the-wall. Best of all, I could run it fanless, which would make it have no moving parts at all. I didn't like that it would creep up above 50C, however, so threw in an as-close-to-silent-as-you-can-get 120mm fan, keeping it down in the low 30s.

      For the file server, I used an Athlon 64 (90nm Winchester 3000). Before drives, it sucks under 50W (again, at-the-wall). Each drive will add 15-25W, so scale up from there. The whole system, however, can realistically draw less than just a naked P4, if I limited it to only two drives (but of course I have more than that, currently four, each as the master with no slave).


      One interesting point I'd like to see discussed, if anyone has a few good links - Motherboard power consumption (aside from the CPU), and "real world" HDD draw. I have three Winchester 3000s (two of which I plan to drop X2s in when they come down in price a tad) in three different motherboards, and they vary by 20W (ie, half the total) idle power use (with the same low-end PCI video card, except one system has on-board video a hell of a lot stronger than that old Trident card (an ATI Radeon XPress 200), and it sucks the least power of the three). Then for HDDs, I can of course find the published TDP, but as with CPUs, that means very close to nothing beyond "make sure your power supply can handle this, but it will never actually need to".


      And, as a last point, if you care about shaving off a few more watts more than money or horsepower (but want something heftier than an Epia), get a Pentium-M board. They can manage around half the power consumption of an Athlon 64 (3W vs 7W idle, and (roughly) 25W vs 50W at load), with around 80% of the performance. At idle (an always-on home server sits idle over 99% of the time, I'd say, unless you stick something like Seti@Home on it), that should compare well (wattage-wise) even to a high-end Epia board.

      • Re:Hey! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 )
        My internet gateway, and my file server (both running Linux). I recently upgraded both from old P3 machines, which suck 30W each just for the CPU, as you mention.

        One of the reasons I dumped the idea of running an internet gateway on a PC was the power consumption. I now run a gateway appliance that draws about 5 watts. For my file server up antil recently I was running a dual P2 400 that drew 60 watts idle (with one HD spinning). My experience is that HD's draw about 7 watts per spindle to keep them spinnin

        • Re:Hey! (Score:2)

          by pla ( 258480 )
          I now run a gateway appliance that draws about 5 watts.

          I had considered that route, but wanted the flexibility of a basically-complete Linux system (without X) as well. If I ever manage to make it off-grid, I'll certainly reevaluate that choice, but for now, the difference has more value to me than saving $0.25 per month on the electric bill.


          I've been using the Kill-a-Watt wattmeter

          Same here - Great little toy, and it has already saved me more than its cost. It amazed me how much power various dev
          • I ditched my 21" CRT for a 19" LCD.

            I haven't optimized my displays yet - I have 3 that I use, a 19" CRT, a 21", and a 20" LCD. From your description I guess I am going to end up making the LCD my primary display.

            I hate to think how much power my home theater draws. Just the subwoofer is rated at 900 watts.

  • EPIA is your friend (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @06:02PM (#13417731) Homepage Journal
    http://www.viaembedded.com/ [viaembedded.com]

    The mini-itx and nano-itx boards require little power to operate, can run any X86 based OS, and some can run off of flash memory devices with no addons required.

    The only drawback to these is that their overall performace is not as fast as their AMD or Intel counterparts, but if silence, space and power savings is what you are looking for then these are a great solution.

    • Caveat Hacker! (Score:3, Informative)

      by renehollan ( 138013 )
      Bewarned that Via has made last minute changes in the Nano-ITX mobo such that the Silverstone LC-07 and LC-08 cases, designed to accomodate it... don't

      Last time I checked, Silverstone is retooling to produce modified cases, but the nano-ITX/LC0[7|8] combo will not be silent: Via nixed the option to let Silverstone use the nano-ITX moniker unless their case accomodated a fan and not a heat block (like their original LC-07 and LC-08 designs). (The new LC-07 nd LC-08 cases supposedly will have vent holes in

    • Careful, the VIA Rhine network controllers have a buggy driver, which might be fixed soon, but who knows. They've been looking for the bug for a year.

      2.6.11 series (and earlier 2.6) - start it up. No problems. Unplug the network cable, and plug it back it. The driver still thinks that the network is unplugged, and it won't work again until you reboot.

      This is bad, because if your switch loses power your NIC never sees it come back up.

      • Build a modular kernel, then remove the module and re-insert it. A hassle, yes, but you won't need to reboot - unless it's a hardware bug, of course :-)
        • Typical Slashdot answer. You understand that most people do NOT want to check their server every once in a while to check if the bloody NIC is still working?

          And use a hell of a complicated solution to solve the problem? Whart happens if you like using stokc diso kernel for some reason and there the NIC is not modularized? What happens if you want to use a specialized kernel for you machine with ALL the drivers built in because it is, well, faster??

          And no, you cannot use the network to warn you of the proble
          • Typical Slashdot answer. You understand that most people do NOT want to check their server every once in a while to check if the bloody NIC is still working?

            Typical "I've never managed a server before" answer.

            If you're running a server that matters at all then you're also running some sort of monitoring program to make sure that your various services are up and running. Furthermore, how often does your switch just "lose power"? If you have an UPS for your server then why isn't your switch plugged
            • > #ifdown eth0 && modprobe -r viarhine
              > #modprobe viarhine && ifup eth0

              First, this does not work. IF the thing went down once it does not compe up again.

              And what do you do when the network card is down? Send a message ove the, uhm, network??

              It is irrelevant if the switch seldomly loses power (mine does) or if someone plugs out a cable once in a while or whatever. The card should work, period. Having to write scripts to check for a broken card is total friggin tripe, now matter how "eas

              • And what do you do when the network card is down? Send a message ove the, uhm, network??

                No. You put the following entry to root's crontab (all in single line):

                * * * * * ! ( ping -w 10 -c 1 www.google.com > /dev/null 2>&1 || ( /sbin/ifdown eth0 ; /sbin/modprobe -r viarhine ; /sbin/modprobe viarhine ; /sbin/ifup eth0 ) > /dev/null 2>&1

                This will try to ping google once per minute, and if it doesn't get proper response withing ten seconds, will try to reset the network.

                I have no id

    • To elaborate on my experiences with a 533MHz Epia system. The performance as a web/mail server is excellent. I can readily manage orders of magnitudes more activity than I really see. Just max out the RAM and let it go.

      But as a graphical interface you will find it's performance lacking. But you can't expect great things from their onboard graphics chip. It's certainly useful and worthwhile, but it's no gaming console.

      What has always surprised me about these boxes is they tend to stick with so much le

  • Localhost (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alethes ( 533985 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @06:02PM (#13417733)
    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?

  • Via C3 Terminator barebones (Score:4, Informative)

    by OneDeeTenTee ( 780300 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @06:03PM (#13417735)
    It's at Newegg for 107USD.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16856110030 [newegg.com]

    Add a few bits and you've got a complete low power system.
  • DFI has a micro-atx desktop motherboard (855GME-MGF) with support for Pentium M chips. The P4 mobile chips are fast, run cool, and use very little power.

    Link to Motherboard [dfi.com.tw]

    ASUS makes an adaptor that allows the use of P4-M CPUs in standard motherboards, but from what I've seen it uses significantly more power than the DFI option (about 25% more)

    • Pentium M, not P4-M (Score:3, Informative)

      by TeknoHog ( 164938 )
      ASUS makes an adaptor that allows the use of P4-M CPUs in standard motherboards

      I'm sure you mean Pentium M. P4-M is practically the same as P4, but Pentium M is the sane choice when you're talking low power with high performance.

  • The subject says it all...
    • I was about to suggest the same thing. The guy is a Mac user, the first thing he should have thought of was the Mac Mini. They are (relatively) cheap at just under $500, draw very little power (Enough to run on a battery modded into the case), and can run OSX or Linux. I hear Ubuntu works quite well on macs, as there is a guy here at the office who runs Ubuntu on his powerbook G3.
    • Yeah it seems that the question is rigged (esp. the 500 dollar part) to come out with mac mini as the answer. Not that the mac mini is a bad piece of hardware, just that the submitter likely knew the answer before asking the question.
      • Heh, the reason I put the $500 in there was that I wanted to use the mac mini as a ceiling. Actually I think I am going to go mini-itx, it is much cheaper than a mac mini with about the same(if not somewhat less) power consumption.
        • I can't find a pre-built mini-itx system that's any cheaper than a Mac mini (and I'm looking, because I'd like a separate box to run Linux and would prefer to wait on buying a mini until they go Intel - it's bad enough having two PPC machines that will be effectively obsoleted by the advent of the MacIntels). Where are you finding it? (I stopped building my own in 2001 after going Mac - it's simply easier not having to constantly tweak your hardware).
          • I don't have mod points so I'll comment instead. Couldn't agree more about the mini. I've been thinking of doing something similar and no mini-itx solution I've found comes close to a Mac Mini. They would also take up a good deal more space from the things I've seen.

          • Enough with the "obsolete PPC Mac" shit! (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            it's bad enough having two PPC machines that will be effectively obsoleted by the advent of the MacIntels

            WTF is up with this asinine mentality? If you want/need the machine now, just buy the friggin' thing. PPC Macs won't cease working the day the first Intel-based Macs go on sale!

            Freescale just committed to supplying Apple with chips through 2008 if necessary, so the hardware transition could be very gradual. Furthermore, any Mac software worth running will be available as a universal binary through at lea
            • I didn't spend $3000 on a PowerMac G5 for it to be a home file server, thank you, I bought it as a workstation. And I doubt that we'll see more than one cycle of fat binary releases (how long did they continue to support the 68x?), where I was expecting this G5 to be good for at least three more software cycles (18-month cycles). Has any software vendor signed a contract with Apple promising to continue fat binary releases until after 10.7 comes out? So, yes, I'd say it's fair to say that the PPC will be ef

        • Re:Buy a Mac Mini (Score:3, Informative)

          by IvyKing ( 732111 )
          A Mac Mini just idling along uses about 10 to 11 watts from the AC mains (that's the total power draw) - a co-worker had a Mac Mini plugged into a wattmeter to measure power consumption in researching running the Mini on batteries (if this reminds you of a recent Slashdot article, it is because it was the very same Mini featured in that article).

          Since you are already familiar with the Mac OS, the mini sounds like the most logical choice to me. I strongly doubt that a mini-itx will have as low of a draw as

  • Athlon64s don't seem to use much power. I haven't been able to measure the usage of the entire board, of course, but my Venice core doesn't get above 50 degrees celsius, and I've got it overclocked to 2.4 ghz. At stock, it didn't get above 40. It can't be using too much power.

    In fact, I think my amd64 server that I leave on all the time, complete with TV tuner / capture card (and a PCI-X card with TV out), gigabit ethernet, 1.8 ghz amd64 Venice, 1 gig of RAM, and a couple of 250 gig hard drives (doing RA
  • Mini-ITX [mini-itx.com] systems are small, and if you get one with a VIA CPU, can need less than 30W, including the hard drive.

    The systems usually sell with case, mb, and CPU.
    They start at about $200.

    Depending on the case, you can use a 2.5" or 3.5" HD, and usually a slim CD or DVD.

    Mini-ITX.com [mini-itx.com] has LOTS of info.

    If you get a VIA, make sure its a recent one (C3?) as the older ones aren't fully 686 compatible so some software won't run on them.

  • Low Power, Small Size, try an old laptop. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DoubleD ( 29726 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @06:12PM (#13417770)
    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 [craigslist.org]

    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.
  • Also running a Mini-ITX server at home. With an 800MHz C3 CPU it's not the fastest machine on the planet but even with two hard drives in it consumes less than 100 watts @ 230v

    Ed Almos
    Budapest, Hungary

  • You want a server for under $500 that is low powered.

    Why not pick up an old pentium and throw in a large HDD? Total cost should be less then $200. There may or may not be a 160GBish or so limit, my current setup uses a small HDD (4GB) to boot up off of and mount an 80GB drive that the bios can't see. A cheapo IDE card would also solve this problem.

    But, you cry, low powered! Simple enough. An old pentium probably isn't even using 100W to spin the disks. That is 2.4 kWh/day, or about $0.24/day if

    • Or, he could pick up something like a Dell PowerEdge SC420. Depending on various deals they run between $200-300. I've got a sc400 celery that has been running 24x7 as my home server for nearly 2 years. It was a brand new machine, not some pentium retread. It is extremely quiet, and reasonbly miserly on power. My 1000va UPS will run it for over 45 minutes. That would give him SATA support and gig ethernet too.

      • Or, he could pick up something like a Dell PowerEdge SC420. Depending on various deals they run between $200-300. I've got a sc400 celery that has been running 24x7 as my home server for nearly 2 years. It was a brand new machine, not some pentium retread. It is extremely quiet, and reasonbly miserly on power. My 1000va UPS will run it for over 45 minutes. That would give him SATA support and gig ethernet too.

        He still has to pay for power, and for any hard drive upgrades.

        I have a "pentium retread" at

        • i'm using a p1 200 as a webserver, works just fine, and it cost the price of a new hd (i could have gotten by with a used one i already had, but i wanted to replace it)
        • Here is what you originally suggested.

          Why not pick up an old pentium and throw in a large HDD? Total cost should be less then $200.

          And my point is that for around $100 more, you get a much more usable machine. Mine runs my PDC, web, ftp, file shares, and I use it as a workstation via a terminal.

          Powerwise, I pulled out an old pentium 120, it used 50w to boot and settled at 45w. For comparision, my 2g laptop uses 45w under a load. A machine nearly identical to my file server used 70w to boot and settled at 65
          • If you're running Linux or a BSD, BIOS hard drive size limits mean nothing. It's something about how it doesn't rely nearly as much on the BIOS as Windows. For instance, I have an old Pentium 133MHz (non-MMX) running Debian Woody with an 80GB hard drive and a 160GB hard drive, and it sees all the space on each one. It currently serves as my backup server running rsback nightly. Note that I had to patch the kernel to see past 137GB because Woody uses an older kernel, but the kernels that most distros (in

    • Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Informative)

      by thegrassyknowl ( 762218 )

      Why not pick up an old pentium and throw in a large HDD?

      It's really quite simple. The buy a slightly faster pentium (they're a bit more efficient in terms of power per cycle). Clock it down. Clock down the RAM speed. I have a 2x550MHz machine running at 2x350 (or so) with slghtly lower core voltage. It doesn't even need fans (well I haven't tried in the warmer weather but that is coming up, so we will see).

      One place that uses quite a bit of power is DRAM. It is continually drawing power to do the re

      • or even use a compact flash to ide adaptor and the biggest cf card you can reasonably afford as a hard disk. great if you have a minimal linux install

    • Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Informative)

      by persona 419 ( 908089 )
      I'm running a PII right now as my firewall/server. It's running headless and is currently drawing 39 amps according to my Kill-A-Watt [google.com]. Stepping over to it right now, I see I've used 14.63 KWH in 483 hours, about 3/10th of a cent per hour if the juice is priced at 10 cents a KWH. Total cost, bought used was $40 (about the same as the Kill-a-Watt)

      my current setup uses a small HDD (4GB) to boot up off of and mount an 80GB drive that the bios can't see

      Or you could just make two partitions on your 200 GB d

  • NSLU2 (Score:5, Informative)

    by jrockway ( 229604 ) <jon-nospam@jrock.us> on Saturday August 27, 2005 @06:23PM (#13417830) Homepage Journal
    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/ [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.)

    • Since it is Debian you're talking about I'd be interesteding in publishing your description on my site too, if you don't have any exclusive AnandTech relationship.

      Site details in .sig.

    • I have an NSLU2 (affectionately called the slug), and have successfully performed the upgrade to Unslung. Let me tell you, this is not a good platform for someone looking to learn on.

      Beyond the memory constraints (only 32mb of RAM), it isn't x86-based, so you'll have to take what someone else thought was a good configuration for pre-compiled binaries, cross-compile on another linux box, or endure the hideously slow compile process on the slug as it enters paging hell due to the low RAM. Even once I got

      • It runs qmail and Apache serving a perl-based CMS I wrote myself just fine. It's NFS performance is also acceptable.

        Any problems you're having are probably related to your own inability :) Which is fine. One would expect a $100 server to be more difficult to administer than a $5000/month outsourced one. Cost is inversely proportional to difficult to administer, I think.
        • Agreed! I'm quite certain that, given enough time and effort, I could probably get it working. I put a couple days work into it and decided that the path-of-least-resistance would be to use it as a file share and syslog server and save the more complicated tasks for more complicated hardware.

  • well, there's the soekris net4801, I suppose... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @06:48PM (#13417959) Journal
    The Soekris [soekris.com] Net4801 might possibly work for you, but be prepared to put in some learning time to get one going. The board, case, and power supply are about $250... you'd have to add a laptop-style drive from there.

    They are completely headless AMD Geode machines... 266mhz Pentium class, with 128mb of RAM. They're primarily meant as routing devices for wireless networks (they have three network ports, and 1 3.3v PCI and 1 miniPCI slot). They are completely fanless, and have a socket for a Compact Flash, which is the normal boot device. They also have a connection for a laptop-style hard drive, and a USB 1.1 port.

    Now, these little guys can really be a chore to get set up, because they have no true video... they route the BIOS text-display calls out through the serial port. And they have no floppy to boot from, so you must either set up a PXE boot environment (what I did the first time... NOT a trivial process for someone who isn't very familiar with Linux and/or the BSDs), or build a bootable CF or laptop drive on another system.

    If you can muscle past the installation difficulty, the boards themselves are absolutely silent, with no moving parts at all. For your application, you'd probably boot off a laptop IDE drive. Most of these small drives aren't designed to be on 24x7, so be sure to look around for one that supports a long duty cycle, and even at that, take regular backups.

    This would give you a small, very low-power solution. The Geode is extremely efficient. I'd have to look it up, but from memory I think it's like 7.5 watts. You could spend more running a nightlight. The drive will add some to that, but it'll definitely stay under 15w, and maybe under 10. It's reasonably powerful, with a decent amount of RAM, and will make very little noise and take up very little space.

    I'm using one of these boxes as a router/firewall, and I like it very much. I hate noise, and with a CF, it is both silent and should last many, many years... no moving parts at all. Folks on the mailing list have claimed that it can sustain 10 megabits comfortably with moderately complex firewalling, and as much as 30 megabits if it's just routing between interfaces. It's not a speed demon, but it's really not bad.

    Another possibility might be the Linksys NSLU2, which is a NAS device that runs Linux, and is apparently pretty hackable. It would be even harder than the Soekris to get going, though...and it's not X86, if that matters. I don't know much about them, but others may chime in with more data.

    • If the Soekris looks attractive, also check out the Mikrotik routerboard series. They're equally cute and have some really slick power options.

      EmbeddedX86, from Technologic Systems, is also in the same niche. I don't know if I'd recommend ANY of these machines for development like the original poster wanted, but if parent's embedded board sounds cool for your particular application, you owe it to yourself to check out all the options. Soekris boards are very cool.
    • The Geode is extremely efficient. I'd have to look it up, but from memory I think it's like 7.5 watts. You could spend more running a nightlight. The drive will add some to that, but it'll definitely stay under 15w, and maybe under 10.

      That's about what I remember from the spec sheet for the Soekris. Bear in mind that is the DC power input to the board and not the draw on the AC mains (which will be higher due to losses in the power supply). The Mac Mini idles around 10 to 11 watts from the AC mains, which

  • Do what I do: WOL (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bozzio ( 183974 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:01PM (#13418033)
    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.

  • Some kind of managed hosting (Score:3, Interesting)

    by subreality ( 157447 ) * on Saturday August 27, 2005 @07:36PM (#13418226)
    Have you considered just getting an account with some managed hosting place? VPS servers are cheap. US$30/mo gets you one here: http://www.rapidvps.com/?page=services [rapidvps.com] , and I've been happy with mine. There are other cheaper places as low as US$10/mo that I've seen. You get root on your own virtual system, some disk, some memory, and some CPU cycles, and you don't have to pay for power, or up-front for the hardware, or any ongoing maintenance, and you'll have better net connectivity than you can probably get from home.
  • At least my high school did. They offer a few computer classes, from programming to web design to hardware and networking. All through the year we surplused out old P2s, and a few of the student techs (including me) got to dig through the machines before they went to the warehouse. At the end of the year, one of the computer teachers had a old P2 and a P3 that he didn't need, and couldn't surplus since they were donated, not standard equipment provided by the school. I was in the right place at the righ
  • Are these personal projects that you need to access from computers other than your PowerBook? If not, why not just run them on your PowerBook when you're using it? The built-in Apache and PHP work great, and it's simple to add a MySQL database. I wrote a little script [patrickgibson.com] that makes it possible to host multiple virtual hosts under Mac OS X, though they're only accessible from that computer by default. (I use NetInfoManager to add additional host names that point at 127.0.0.1.)
  • why not pick up the USD 499 Mac Mini? Mine is working just fine as a small server.

  • There was a company out here in Ottawa Rebel, they used a MIPS process that was an extremly lower power consumption processor (same one used in a Compaq/HP Ipaq) and that company died a horrible death. No one CARES about power consumption! They care about is the power of the processor only.
    • Second that. If it was not true, you would see more published specs for power consumption. I hate that there aren't more published specs. power is cheap, my post on a different thread explained how I know my PII is only costing me about $26.53 a year, no problem if it's coming from a wall socket, but very important if you are pulling that from a bank of batteries. It's also converting electrical power to heat at a 100% efficiency ratio, something else to keep in mind. I have a 30 watt electrical heater in
    • As I've understood it there are plans for new modells, among those Freescales new PPC7448 (something like dual-core G4 with 64-bit instructions, altivec, and 10watt at 1.5GHz or so. That might be incorrect.)
      I don't remember chipset names and so on.

  • Three words: Mac mini ! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @09:23PM (#13418775) Homepage Journal
    I'm running several sites on my Mac Mini. I'm using OS X but it'll run Linux just fine from what I hear. Might not be the fastest thing on the planet but you said 'personal', right? I'm running MySQL, Geeklog, Gallery, and many other things on it and the limit is bandwidth (256k up DSL), not CPU.

    It's quiet enough to keep in the bedroom (the nearby TiVo is louder) and it's much faster than the PIII/500 Compaq Deskpro EN SFF that it replaced (that's another low-power box, and those corporate Compaqs last forever) though half the reason I switched was because it's just so much easier to get everything working on OS X.*

    Plus, it'll work great with your PB (native file sharing = easy two-way backups) which in turn will be the perfect portable development environment since it's got the same OS. This guy [mundy.org] has some really good guides on doing ISP-like stuff under OS X and Marc [entropy.ch] is your source for all the packages you'll need.

    * I've been using Linux since 1998 but every time I put together a box I can never get everything working at once. My last attempt with Fedora resulted in a box with PHP and MySQL, but PHP did not have something it needed to talk to MySQL. Another box had PHP and MySQL but something else didn't want to take, and so on, and so on.
    • * I've been using Linux since 1998 but every time I put together a box I can never get everything working at once. My last attempt with Fedora resulted in a box with PHP and MySQL, but PHP did not have something it needed to talk to MySQL. Another box had PHP and MySQL but something else didn't want to take, and so on, and so on.

      Have you considered that, perhaps, despite using linux for 7 years, you're bad at it?
      • After using Linux since 1998, maybe he just needs some sleep.
      • Ubuntu: installs fine. apt-get apache. apt-get mysql. apt-get php. httpd is running. mysqld is running. phpinfo() works. but php can't talk to mysql. googling the error message doesn't lead to a fix.

        OS X: apache's already there. download & run mysql installer. download & run php installer. bam! everything works.

        Yup, you're right, must be me. All hail St. Linus.
  • I've got one of the fanless 533mhz C3's on a VIA EDEN board. All the stuff you would need for a light server, uses about 7 watts, and ran most major Linux distros without any extra drivers as of a few years ago. Running tomcat to front end a MP3 collection for my car, so I guess counts. (grin) All told, the mainboard/CPU was ~100USD, and the total project was about ~250USD mostly due to building a DC to DC power supply that played nice with a 12V system.

    I pushed things a bit further and replaced the 'pow

  • xbox? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anubis350 ( 772791 ) on Saturday August 27, 2005 @10:12PM (#13418964)
    an xbox running debian with a bigger HD...?

  • I'm in a similar position. Compute power isn't important, but power consumption and noise are. I used an old 486 IBM Thinkpad for 2 years in such a server role, and that worked great. It was a little slow with the apt-gets, but that was my only complaint. Since then, I took it up to a PowerMac 7600 and although I didn't get out the power meter, it seemed to fit the bill nicely and the price was right (honestly only really wanted more RAM).

    My next computer for this role may well be an old Powerbook (eit

  • Ok,

    Weighing in with my two cents worth, for what it's worth, I'd like to brain dump what I would consider worth while options for your needs. All of these are solutions I either have used in the past successfully, or am currently using for various purposes. So bear in mind that this is not just the causal musings of a thread cruiser, but actual tried and proven solutions ;-)

    First some basic assumptions:

    1) You want to run some form of Unix or Unix like system ( i.e. Linux ) - you've noted you currently use y

  •   Lamp, Apache, MySQL, PostSQL, etc.

      'runs in text-mode on slow machines with 64 MB

      Check DistroWatch.com for the latest version.
  • Unless you need the server experience for some reason, I have no idea why are going to spend all that money, including recurring costs such as power and replacement parts as the machine ages, just to do your web projects. For less than $30 per month you can find some hosting provider with the right mix of features for you. Heck, mine provides every bell and whistle you can think of from .NET/SQL Server 2000 on down on the MS side and PHP/MySQL/etc. on the FOSS side for the same account, 20 GB of space, an
  • ... that should be reasonably in-expensive, as well as not drawing all that much power.

    Go to e-bay and pick up a Zaurus SL-5500, check price watch for a 1 gig SD card, and find a network adapter that works in your environment. (10/100 wired Hawking cf-network card, or linksys wifi cf card perhaps.)

    Add Apache, to make it a web server, Samba to make it a file server. Granted it won't have a lot of storage space, but if you are just looking for something to host a small personal web site, do a bit of programi
    • if it consumes 1800mW at 110V, that's 16mA of current. at 220V, expect it to draw 8.5mA of current and to also dissipate roughly 1800mW. and they gave you a geek license?
      • I stand corrected. Per the documentation, On battery it draws 2.5W, on AC adapter it drawss 6.2W.

        As otherwise noted, Watts will not change by voltage, though current will. The brick is a 13W power source, at 5.0V. i.e. it provides about 2 amps of power, i.e. it has a loss of some 3 watts. (though some of that loss is very likely to be simply calculation error allowance.)

        Nope, I didn't get a geek licence. Just happen to be one...

        -Rusty
  • Woud the KuroBox [kurobox.com] suit your purposes?

    Hmm... the Revolution Store [revolutionstore.com] and main web site [revogear.com] appear to be undergoing some sort of maintenance at the moment, but the wiki [kurobox.com] is still online...

    I originally saw this on robots,net [robots.net], but it looks like it might suit your needs...
  • I am running FreeBSD 5.4 on a Via Epia ME6000 mini-itx system that cost less than $350 for the motherboard, a half Gig of memory, and a case (all new parts). It has an old hard disk and uses about 40 watts running 24/7 as a mail server, web server, and radio time shifter (see http://www.io.com/~rotenber/ [io.com] ).

    When I wish I can fire up XORG, Xfce4, and Firefox to surf the web, and as far as I can tell this does not slow down any of the other services.

    In my opinion this system is the perfect server, although I w
  • Start thinking "yesterday's box"...

    Yesterday's webserver was a P2-300 with probably 256MB of memory and a 40 gig (if you were lucky) hard drive. Actually, there was probably a RAID box in there, but you get what I am saying...

    These kinds of boxes are thrown away today, and are still perfectly servable (load up a LAMP system) for home-base web development. They won't pull the power of a new P4 system, and if you want lower power, underclock the sucker. You *will not* tax this box with development only (heck,

  • Get an old Pentium One 133MHz or something. You don't need that much CPU for a headless box that is just moving stuff from the hard drive to the wire. I have a 90MHz Pent box that is my firewall, mailserver, MRTG, and webserver. There is nothing that a 1.5Mb/s DSL pipe can do to swamp it. Save the P4 for games and editing video, or running XP.

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