Power consumption - Running a server at home

leaskovski

leaskovski

leaskovski

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Joined
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Hi people,

I am toying with the idea of hosting a service on my dsl connection at home for my mobile device and thus currently I am gonna have to leave my PC up and running with the virtual machine open.

This is obviously gonna be a drain on my power usage at home. Now I was thinking that if I wanted to 'save the planet' I could in theory buy a clapped out old laptop and use that.

Would this likely save on power (plus give me a bit of a UPS option for the server as well) or is it going to be negligible?

Cheers
 
i would think it would, a celeron one or something. Or building a machine with really energy efficient components.
You cant just buy an old rig/laptop and expect it to be energy saving though, as time has gone on there have been more energy saving things implemented etc.

It wont offer UPS option really, since it wont be powering your DSL modem/router.
 
Buying a laptop as a UPS won't really matter too much given that if you have a power outage the modem won't be working to begin with. However I've run an old laptop as a server before and it should be more efficient than most PCs of similar specification although not particularly quick.
 
Yes it would definitely save on power. A laptop at idle might use 10 W. A desktop with all the trimmings might use 10 times that.

What do you want to host? If it's just web, FTP, IRC, etc. then there are a bunch of very nice embedded devices that would be even better than a laptop. The Linksys NSLU2 is popular for this. A friend of mine has one with a USB HDD running Apache, an FTP server, an IRC bot, automated backups, and some other stuff. They're tiny and use very little power.
 
Hmm, well i wanna runa linux box with apache2 and php (with the php_imap module) on it. However at some stage I may wanna get a bit torrent client running so i ever want to download stuff i can que it up on it.

Could that embedded device handle that?
 
Hmm, very interesting!

So with the external device be it a usb stick or a usb disk drive, is this where the linux files are installed to (the OS) or is that flashed to the slugs internal memory?
 
It's installed on the USB disk, either flash or HDD.

HDD is preferable. The device doesn't have much internal RAM so a large (perhaps 128 MiB) swap partition is beneficial. Putting this on a flash device will wear it out prematurely. Some people put the OS on flash and the swap and storage on a USB HDD.

Debian is the best distro for these devices: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Debian/HomePage

There's a really good audio setup tutorial from Chess Griffin here: http://www.linuxreality.com/podcast/episode-65-linksys-nslu2/
 
Hmm, im tempted, but by the time I pick one of these up and then get a small external usb disk for it, it may well be getting to the cheapo laptop price, which will then make it easier for me to configure as i can then run ubuntu desktop on it.
 
That's true, but big 3.5" hard disks are much much cheaper. Price it out. Factor in the power savings of about £20 per yea, depending of course on how much you pay for electricity. :p
 
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