Since the earliest days in our shared flat an old from spare parts assembled Celeron 400/256MB with SuSE 9.0 has served us well as a file-/printserver and router/firewall. But now I thought the time was right to replace this rather old piece of hardware with a new and shiny one ;)
For some time I had a bundle consisting of a PChips M811 Mainboard and the low power AMD Geode 1750+ CPU lying arround. So this should act as the basis for our new server. This is the bundle from my Modding Projekt
by the way and is therefore perfectly suited for it’s new purpose in a low noise, power saving system.
At first our need were quite moderate:
Routing with NAT, printersharing through CUPS and perhaps sharing one file or another across the server’s harddisk.
But if one already goes through the trouble of keeping a system up and running 24/7 it’s self suggesting to use those ressources for some additional tasks ;)
- Access to a running X-Session via VNC for every user to be able to run X-Windows applications comfortably from a remote computer
- A seperate harddisk for the purpose of backing up some data from the workstation which is usually in sleep-mode and only spins up if a backup/restore operation is in progress
- A seperate harddisk for SAMBA/filesharing within our shared flat
- Utilization of various services like DHCP, Apache, MySQL, Qmail, Nagios (for development reasons and monitoring some more remote servers in a data center)
- Reduction of the system’s power consumption to a minimum by using PowerNOW-frequency scaling, the harddiscs’ standby and sleep modes and avoiding unessesary hardware like CD-ROM drive and video card.
- Noise – although the server is located in the corridor it should be as silent as possible ;)
So the old Celeron is ready to retire ;)
Short and painless –
- Celeron 400
- 256 MB SD-RAM
- some Gigabyte mainboard
- 160 GB Samsung harddrive
- tumbledown BigTower box ;)
- SuSE Linux 9.0 – well let’s just say that was not the smartest decicion to make -.-
As mentioned before the combination of the PChips mainboard M811 and AMD’s Geode 1750+ processor from my Modding Projekt should form the heart of the new server. The CPU works with a FSB of 100 Mhz which allows it to vary its internal clock speed between 525 and 1050 Mhz to save additional power and maybe make it possible to cool the CPU passively.
As power supply I just use some noname one. In doubt you should use a rather small one because of the supposedly low power consumption and the fact that most switching power supplies reach their peak efficiency at a workload around 80%. To make the whole thing really quiet I replaced the main fan with a temperature controlled model which only starts up if necessary while the main cooling is done by a very silent additional fan installed at the bottom of the power supply. By the way it sucks in its air directly above the cpu cooler and provides additional air flow. At last I painted the whole thing in a shiny red so that it doesn’t look so boring ;)
The cooling concept dictates that all case fans blow the air out of the case except for the blowhole in the side panel above the cpu cooler. After sealing the case’s other vents only the blowhole is left to suck in fresh cool air which then streaks directly over the cpu cooler. When I removed one of the slot covers and therefore created a second venting hole the CPU temperature rised about 4 °C which shows that an “air tight” case is imperative for this kind of cooling.
Additionally to the already mentioned hardware there’s also 768 MB DDR RAM, two 160 GB and one 60 GB hard drives, an ISDN – Card and a secondary network adapter.
To save power I omitted graphics card/cd-rom drive and deactivated the onboard sound/modem/blablabla. So finally the whole system only consumes around 35 and 45 Watts despite the fact that it is quite good equipped.
As operating system I dicided to use Gentoo Linux with the 2.6.19-gentoo-r5 Kernel
For the usual stuff I installed Samba, Cups, Apache, MySQL. Additionally I have a ntp-service and Nagios running. Routing and firewall stuff is done by Firestarter with some support of dynamic IP distribution through dhcpd.
Of course I also made use of frequency scaling with AMD’s PowerNOW.
I plan on publishing some more detailed information about the setup of each service and function in seperate howtos.
Until then there are of course also other sources of information available:http://www.vdr-portal.de/board/thread.php?threadid=47006
http://www.vdr-wiki.de/wiki/index.php/Beispielkonfiguration_-_AMD_Geode_NX_1750_M811_picoPSU
