[conspire] Another low-power server

[Luke S Crawford]

Don Marti <dmarti at zgp.org> writes:

> On the subject of ARM-based systems for SOHO servers,
> here's one that has 512MB of RAM, which should make
> it usable for real web apps:
> 
>   http://www.open-rd.org/
> 
> It's based on the Marvell Sheeva SoC, which has its
> own built-in Ethernet.  I don't know about the driver
> for it.  They're offering Ubuntu images, among others.


wow. sweet.  I was pretty excited about the atom boards, too...
but I was so dissapointed when I got them and they put this decently low-power
cpu on a board with a chipset that draws 50w (meaning the 2gib max ram
atoms draw about 20% less power than a 8GiB max core2duo that supports
unbuffered ecc.  useless.)

I've got a bunch of OpenBSD paranoids who want OpenBSD (which isn't 
paravirtualized because Theo doesn't like the security tradeoffs, and
I personally don't sell full virtualization becuase *I* don't like
the security, performance and stability tradeoffs.)  These look like they
might be a good solution.

These would also be good for things like kerberos servers.  
(I mean, I don't think the co-lo would like me wiring up a thermite charge
to the chassis intrusion detection switch, but just keeping the kerberos
db on a ramdisk  or an encrypted disk that requires me to verify the hardware
before inputing a key is probably good enough)