[conspire] Measure Your Electrical Power Consumption at CABAL

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 07:44:26PM -0700:

> 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.  

When I scp or "git push" a large file to it, sshd uses
75-90% of the CPU.  It would be mean to make too many
people rely on it at once. (It does fine on NAT and
DNS duties during a big transfer, though.)

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

I don't think I'd run all the stuff on mine that
you run on your home server. Spamassassin wouldn't
be happy.

> 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.

Last desktop/server CPU, maybe.  But there are now
some servers based on Atom.  This one will take 2
2.5in drives:

  http://supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5015/SYS-5015A-H.cfm?typ=H

-- 
Don Marti                                 +1 510-332-1587 mobile
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org