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#1 Re: minimum power consuming network setup Posted by endecotp (62.253.xx.xx) on Mon 19 Mar 2007 at 16:58 Hi Paule, I have been trying to achieve something like this and I think I have somewhat succeeded - and since all of my systems run Debian, I don't consider it off-topic for Debian-Administration! I rent a virtual server. In my case it runs user-mode-linux, though today other virtualisation technologies like Xen seem to be more popular. The end result is the same though; you get a portion of a fast machine. Quite how fast it is depends on what the other customers are doing; mine seems to be crippled at the moment by very poor disk I/O speed, but it varies from day to day. Anyway, I find it sufficient for the time being, and it gives me an always-available machine which I can access from anywhere. As for power consumption, well you have to estimate how many other users the servers have, but I would guess that it's taking very roughly 100W between 25 users, which is not bad. If you don't want a virtual machine, try google("mini itx colocation"). Then at home I have an always-on NSLU2 with currently about 8 GB of flash drives as an NFS server, print server, and so on. This takes around 5 W. The point about this is that it would be too slow to have my "home" home directory NFS-mounted from the virtual server, but by using the always-on NSLU2 to serve it, it can still be accessible from anywhere. There are alternatives to the NSLU2, but the NSLU2 has a large community of people already using Linux on it, and you can run regular Debian. For my desktop I have a mini-ITX box with a VIA C3 1GHz processor, and a 4 GB flash drive. This takes about 20W (and of course the monitor takes more). It's actually sold as a thin client, but it is more than adequate for everything I do. There are newer VIA boards with 1.2 GHz C7 processors that provide more performance at lower power, maybe as low as 6 W in some cases. None of my home equipment has a fan, and the only moving parts are in the keyboards, and in my CD/DVD drive (which is a USB device that I only plug in when I need to use it). The key software elements, in my experience, are: - Avoiding bloatware, so that you can run from flash. - Client-server applications (i.e. IMAP for email). - Good connectivity software, i.e. VNC, rsync, ssh tunnels, Anyterm. For TV connectivity, try something like the Hauppage MediaMVP. Regarding good places to ask about this sort of thing: the NSLU2 forums are quite active, as are the OpenWRT forums, and I imagine that the MythTV people would have experience of the TV aspect. Good luck. Phil.

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