Cool, quiet, and reasonably priced server
By Andrew Smith
This is a post about open source, don’t grumble, that’s my job.
What’s it got to do with open source? Well, littlesvr.ca is the channel for my open source work to get from my desktop to the users. It’s an emal server, a web server, an FTP/Telnet/SSH server, a Subversion server, a mailing list server, and probably some other things I can’t remember now.
It used to be a PII and it performed brilliantly. But now I got a new one from Koolu. It’s not crap cheap (about 400 CAD with taxes and shipping) but I think it’s worth the money. Here’s the old littlesvr.ca on the left and the new one on the right:
Little indeed! And it’s actually a much better machine. An AMD Geode LX700 (~500MHz), 512M ram, 80G hard drive, 4USB ports and one 100Mbps nic. I have two of these and to one of them I added an external 200G USB hard drive to store all my p… I mean data.
A couple of close-ups:
Compared to other ‘mini’ PCs it’s a winner. It’s an actual PC. The only one I could find with no fans and with a hard drive.
There are some huge advantages to these little guys as compared to a ‘normal’ computer:
- Almost completely quiet. No fans at all, and you have to put your ear next to it to hear the drive spin.
- Uses little power. My PII would drain the UPS it was on in 10 minutes. This one uses less than 10W (maximum) so it would probably last for an hour or more.
- Having no fans (that can fail) it is much less likely to set your house on fire (seriously, burning down a half a million dollar home because of a dead fan in a cheap computer is a scary thought).
And there’s a bonus (if you care about such things) the company that makes it is based in the south of Ontario (not far from Toronto).
So, back to open source: it’s running Slackware (but any other Linux distro would do) and if you’re the kind of person who would like their own servers, it’s a bargain. Skills for the setup depend on what you want. SSH works out of the box, telnet and FTP are trivial to set up, SVN is easy, Apache is harder, MySQL is harder still, and don’t even bother with the mail server unless you’re really hardcore. Get an old PC that’s sitting unused and try to set it up.
And I have to complain about something: why is it that it took me 3 years to find this box? Why do people want to have a quad-core 64-bit monster to serve 1 HTTP request per minute? It’s everyone else’s fault that I was wasting electrical energy just because I wanted to control my data.
September 18th, 2007 at 4:36
Hmm… $400CND is a wee bit pricey for what you get… like $75 I think, considering its competition is old recycled boxes which usually are free (as people upgrade to nice shiney game boxes). The low-power, low-heat, low-noise + tiny is rather cool though. 802.11 would also be REALLY helpful with this thing (hide it somewhere w/o running a network connection to it).
I wonder if you could turn the thing into a media box with a USB_TV_tuner (something like this (http://www.usb-ware.com/ads-minitv-usb-tv-tuner.htm) and a VGA_to_SVideo (http://www.computercasesandcables.com/ccc/CV-25120.html)
Also, why the problems with MySQL and mailserver? Is it that these two programs are difficult to set up, or is it that this little box makes things more difficult?
September 18th, 2007 at 4:57
I have one of their older models and it has a wireless antenna sticking out of it (but no wireless card :)). I never bothered to investigate because I don’t like wireless generally, as a technology.
A media box is the kind of thing that actually does need every MHz you got, so probably not a good idea for that.
MySQL needs securing. Things like root passwords set, anonymous users deleted, etc. It took me a several hours of reading the manual the first time I did it. The mailserver? Are you kidding? I have a post queued up about m4 and the like, sendmail is the most evil server I configured in my life.
September 18th, 2007 at 17:08
“A media box is the kind of thing that actually does need every MHz you got, so probably not a good idea for that.”
You can get TV Tuner cards that do all the work in hardware (very little resources are used on the PC)… video/audio output is something my 450mhz PIII can do easily.
In regards to the software (MySQL, sendmail etc), my question isn’t “Is setting this stuff up difficult?” but rather “is setting this stuff up MORE difficult on this little box?”
September 18th, 2007 at 17:18
No, the box is just a regular PC as far as the software is concerned.
September 18th, 2007 at 20:55
Its a safe bet to assume that these little guys are running off the VIA mainboards.. (check it out here http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/)
September 19th, 2007 at 4:56
This tiny form factor is becoming popular lately.
See:
http://www.fit-pc.com – very similar, even lower power – 5W, supports Windows XP
http://www.zonbu.com – without HDD, but may be better for multimedia