Server Farms Live Off Open Source

But they ARE needed! One is the router, one is the fileserver, other is the web server, one is the torrent/"there in case someone else is here and wants to play a linux game with me" box...

:)

(actually I could probably get a couple more working machines up but I'm short on RAM and hard disks)

...And they DO save on power!

I use an old IBM P75 desktop box as a firewall/gateway. My kitchen machine is a P100. For static-page HTTP, a P133 with a newish HD swapped in is more than adequate (my main house file server is a K6-233); a 486DX2-66 would work. (For pushing PHP/MySQL at a decent speed for, say, MediaWiki, GeekLog, eFiction or WordPress, well, that takes a little more power -- say, a PII/350.)

All of these old roadsider boxes, when cleaned up and given newer IDE drives, work just fine while barely throwing off heat. FLOSS and QRP-computing* work quite well together on the home front.

*QRP: A Q-signal (decrease transmitting power) which became an attitude in ham radio -- use the minimum power necessary to get the message across. QRPp enthusiasts explore how little wattage can result in a successful contact. See also a table of Q-signals at http://www.wemsi.org/qsigs.html, or activities of QRPers at http://www.arrl.org.

mmm. Nice. Router is a Duron 700, Fileserver is a k6/2-450, Web/FTP/IRC/TeamSpeak/etc. server is a PIII-866 which you can visit at http://techiem2.no-ip.com:444 , torrent box is an AthlonXP 2200+, and this baby is a Sempron 64 2600+. :) (yes, I know some of those could be lower, but they're what I had available when I was building them)

I brought home a PII-400 SCSI box recently that I'm planning to upgrade to a 450 (got a chip in the basement somewhere) and make it into a little web surf box.

Oh, there's also the Celery 566 web box, but it's not on right now. Need to get that running again too.

So many boxes to build, so few needed parts....(like hard disks...)

Home LAN only; none of my boxes have a presence on the Internet.

Router/firewall is a 486 dx4 120. NFS /home, music and photos server is a PIII 866, doubling as my wife's desktop. Piles of stuff on a K6-2 500 served up to the LAN via LAMP and LAPP; it could be shut down and the drives moved to another box, a P (pre-MMX) 166, which handles fax and used to handle dial-in. Couple of desktops, stuffed with drives (does anybody ever have enough hard drive space?): P4 2.2, Athlon 1.2.

grouch:

What's LAPP? I'm not familiar with that one.

Heck, my computer IS one of those old computers that you can keep running with Linux and OSS! My computer is six years old and right now, its all I got. I love it though, I love finding out how to do things and figure out how to 'keep up'. I can watch DVD's and listen to all the music I want too.

...I like the way the line runs up the back of the stocking.. - Van Halen

techiem2:

LAPP == Linux Apache PostgreSQL PHP

aaah. Thanks.

Actually, I just replaced 4 machines of various vintages. (pentium 75 , pentium2 266, pentium pro 180, and a quad processor sparcserver 20) by combining them all on a single machine using VMware server. The cases have all been split apart (aluminum in the blue box, steel to the steel recycler), and I am looking for a proper way to dispose of the motherboards, and hard drives

I expect my power bill to be reduced by about 5-10 dollars per month.

The problem with this solution is in the 3 weeks I have had this set up I have made even more virtual machines, and now I need to pick and choose which ones I want to run, so I don't end up pageing them to disk.

This will suffice until I can get a Dual core machine with pacifica/vx and load it up with ram. at that time I can switch to Xen as well.

I'm a regular on gamedev.net. I've heared of people there (3D artists mainly) who collect old boxes and make home grown renderfarms out of them. Sheer brilliance!

I have 7 or so computers at home, but not all are running. My server is open to the public because I'm running subversion and bugzilla off it for my gnome-hearts project.