[conspire] DVI to VGA (was Re: CABAL this Saturday)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (tony at of.net):

> Looks like HDMI to me, not DVI.

fit-PC model 2i is definitely DVI.  Note picture:
http://www.hardwareinsight.com/fit-pc-2i/

> Surprised you're looking at is as a server replacement.  External hard
> drives on a server?  SAN?  Dual gigabit ethernet means you could
> isolate SAN from the rest of the network.  Hmmm.

Internal would also be perfectly fine.  

SAN?  Huh?  You're possibly unclear on what problem I'm hoping to
address, as SAN strikes me as a ludicrous degree of overengineering for
this role.

The driving concern is AC power draw and consequent household cost.  If
I can replace the current host with either an ARM-class or Atom-based
host with reasonable RAM support and ability to drive a pair of modern
hard drives in MD mirror mode on Debian[0], then I save lots of AC every
month -- while at the same time migrating off aging hardware that 
is at well past the end of its economic service life.  Quoting:  'Fit PC
2i uses 6W at low CPU load, 8W at full CPU load, and less than 1W at
standby.'  8W (plus HDs' power draw) sounds good to me.[1]

Modern HDs are more reasonable than the antiques on my shelf, the best
of which are SCSI SCA 73 GB, 3.5" form factor.  Those were fine drives
in their day, but that was a decade ago.  I'm up for the higher
fragility of 2.5" SATA drives; that's what mirroring's for.


In general, the ARM or Atom-based hosts I've seen that seem feasible 
generally (primarily referring to support for at least 2 GB RAM) lack
physical space inside for two HDs.  Some have space for one, but I
haven't seen two.  So, I figure two USB-connected externals would do.


[0] No, I'm not OK with running my primary server on solid state media.
And no, I'd not be willing to run a specialised distribution.

[1] http://lists.svlug.org/archives/svlug/2009-October/032805.html
http://lists.svlug.org/archives/svlug/2009-October/032806.html
http://lists.svlug.org/archives/svlug/2009-October/032809.html