[conspire] Measure Your Electrical Power Consumption at CABAL

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Weisler (mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us):

> I plan to bring my nifty Kill-A-Watt power consumption meter to CABAL
> tomorrow. You can plug in your computer(s) and measure how much juice
> you use.

Coolness.  We can settle once and for all the long-running speculation
within my household about how much power (and money from my pocket, as I
pay the PG&E bill) my and Deirdre's servers cost.

Cheryl claims that it'd be cheaper for me to operate a colo box or
virtual server than to keep running my VA Linux Systems model 2230
(PIII, three old SCSI drives) 24x7 on house current.  I suspect that's
utter rubbish, but it'd be nice to be able to crunch the numbers.

No doubt, a better choice on home LANs would be something like Don
Marti's Linksys NSLU2 "slug" server with one or two external USB HDs
(for mirroring).  Newer HDs draw way less power, and the NLSU2
(discontinued in 2008) uses an Intel XScale IXP420 CPU, which is
extremely power-thrifty.  Like other ARM-family CPUs, it lacks floating
point, though, so SSH/SSL is probably painful.  And, operation with more
than 64 MB RAM is reported to have never been stabilised.  

But something _like_ a "slug" is probably The Right Thing.

Anyway, one of the reasons I stick with my VA Linux gear, aside from
sentiment and familiarity, is that the PIII was Intel's last CPU that
wasn't, IMO, a power-guzzler.  I have a perfectly OK P4-based Dell
PowerEdge 1850 1U as a spare:  Doubtless, it's a better machine (if
ridiculously noisy), but I figure the power draw's much, much worse.