Tiny Server

The opportunity

I am an IT professional and spend a lot of what should be my spare time fiddling on computers. I like to run my own mail and web server, for the learning and the experiment I can do more than the convenience, I realise that a hosted service would be easier and a lot more efficient. This means that I leave my computer on 24 hours a day, all year long...

In early 2006, my computer is based on an ASUS P2B with an Intel Pentium II Deschutes 350 MHz. It is both my server and my main worksation. Even though it has 768 MB of memory, some modern applications such as Firefox and Gimp do take a long time to startup and to accomplish some tasks. It is time to upgrade !

My needs for a server are very modest, and the current setup would in fact suffice if it were used as a server only. I have therefore decided to split the server and workstation functions, and to use a low power machine for the server.

How low ?

Even though I only started looking at this seriously this year, I have been wanting to go low power for a while, and had kept my October 2005 issue of ;login: in which Robert Haskins wrote an excellent article (sorry, available to USENIX members only), about Embedded Systems. He lists an Embedded Systems characteristics as:

• Low power utilization
• Small size and comparatively lower cost
• Limited use of active cooling devices (fans)
• Limited CPU and memory

This is pretty much what I was after except for the last bullet: "limited CPU and memory". Working in IT, and using the computer both to learn and play, this limitation was too restrictive for me. For example I have also been wanting to implement virtualisation with software such as Xen and VMware, and the systems presented in the article were not powerfull enough for this.

It became obvious that the solution that would best suit my needs was right in the middle, a computer that use as little as possible electrical power, without compromising computing convenience: a tiny server.