Thinking of building a low power linux file server....anyone done this?

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Geshtar

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 15, 2004
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I've been contemplating building a file server for some time now, but I want a somewhat sophisticated setup that I don't know how hard it is to do or if it is possible (probably is, I can't be the first to want this)

What I want is a file server that I can map the drives to on my main pc/laptops via nfs/samba. The tricky part is that I would like the fileserver to power down when nothing is connected to it and automatically restart up when I turn on another comp that starts to try and map the drives via WakeOnLan or something. I would especially like for the mounting of the file server as a network drive to be automatic.

Some form of authentication would also be nice, so not just anyone can get in to it, but is a secondary concern.

The clients connecting to this would be both linux and windows machines...
I am leaning toward some flavor of ubuntu for my distro since I know its mechanics a bit better than other distros.

Googling has so far turned up results that don't quite match what I am looking for(most things I have seen seem to have more manual steps than I want when it comes to waking the machine up, none have mentioned drive mapping either). Has anyone done this and know what is involved?

Thanks in advance.
-Geshtar
 
I don't know much about the wake on lan side of this, but samba sharing to windows works great, it is a real dream over gigabit. It has a plethora of authentication options. NFS is extremely fast (I saw 60MiB/s the other day) but is alarmingly insecure, adn I am nto sure of a graceful way of mounting it on windows machines.
 
You would have to come up with some sort of script on the clients in order for this to happen. I doubt there is anything seamless that you just click on a folder, wait, and it starts up, though.
 
Well i though the title sounded like something have done, but after reading the actual post, im not so sure now.

I just recently put together a sweet Via system, with a C3 processor @ 900mhz with a gig of ram and a 250 gig hdd. Its actually a sweet system, runs super fast (i was actually really surprised at how fast it ran. And it run Ubuntu Drake right now, though i am considering transferring over to OpenSUSE but am not sure yet.
 
Something to consider, the "400 series" conroe-based Celerons have a TDP of 35W. Not too shabby.

AMD's Geode uses 5W for the whole thing, you might be able to cobble something together there.
 
Personally, I'm not a big fan of having to wait for a network drive to come up and waiting for a system to boot up to access the data on it would be intolerable to me. That's just my personal opinion and it doesn't seem to have much bearing on the topic at hand.

I definitely do not know of a way in which you could get this to be setup and it would probably be more trouble than it's worth.

You would probably be better off just building a low power system which you can just leave on and not have to worry about the setup and configuration headaches. Plus you wouldn't have to wait to access the data on the system.

If the system won't do anything other than serve files, the VIA C3 platform would probably work out very well for you as has already been suggested. It's not going to use much power at idle at all. If you have older hardware around you would prefer to use, you could try underclocking the processor and dropping the voltage on it to get power consumption down. I used to have a 35 watt AthlonXP mobile 2400+ that was a damn good overclocker. I'd bet with some work I could have gotten the default clockspeed (around 1.8Ghz I think) down very low as well as dropping the core voltage to below the 1.35v it was rated for. That would have cut the power usage of the processor down to a fraction of what it was. You might want to look into something like that instead.

 
SmokeRngs said:
Personally, I'm not a big fan of having to wait for a network drive to come up and waiting for a system to boot up to access the data on it would be intolerable to me. That's just my personal opinion and it doesn't seem to have much bearing on the topic at hand.

Click to expand...

Well, the idea is the system turns on when I turn my main computer on and stays on so long as it is on. So I wouldn't really have to wait for data per say. Generally when I first start things up I don't generally start diving into my data.

I think the scripts might be the way to go...have a startup script send WakeOnLan info, and maybe have the server go into hibernation if there is no activity for like 4 or 5 more hours.



For hardware I was thinking of a mobile processor, I think some of the newer intel chips are 25W, but I will look into the Via stuff. Anyone have info on what kinda transfer rates you can get with a Via system using gigabit?
 
I just bought some of the finishing parts for my low power server, It's currently
a Celeron 733, 192mb ram and a 9gb hd. Had to see if the small heatsink I bought would cool it well enough. I'm looking foward to building a custom case or buying a small one and sticking a good amount of disk space. Since it's not anything that's going to be under huge load I figure I'll host my website off it, use it for storage and e-mail or something or other :p

-Best of luck with your
plan though, be sure to update us
as you go :)
 
As an alternative, you could build it around a laptop. You'd be reduced to a 2.5" or USB drive, but if that's acceptable they're pre-build and low-power (and you get an integrated UPS as a bonus). You should be able to get it to go into a fairly low-power state after a timeout (and there's usually good instructions and software for setting this up on laptops), which might be good enough.
 
I just assembled a nice little system running Debian 4.0. The box is running a Pentium M 730 which I always keep at 800MHz and 1.0V. I'm looking into patching the kernel so it will underclock to .750V.

Currently, there is no hard drive on the box save for the trio of 500GB SATA drives I'll be installing which will run in RAID 5. The OS is running off of a 2GB flash drive.

Right now, without the 500GB drives, the file server idles at 31W.
 
The reason laptops are interesting: I've seen a T61 claim to idle at 10W, in Vista.
Granted, the power brick might be inefficient enough to bring that up to something comparable, and I'd take it with a pinch of salt anyway.
 
Child of Wonder said:
I just assembled a nice little system running Debian 4.0. The box is running a Pentium M 730 which I always keep at 800MHz and 1.0V. I'm looking into patching the kernel so it will underclock to .750V.

Currently, there is no hard drive on the box save for the trio of 500GB SATA drives I'll be installing which will run in RAID 5. The OS is running off of a 2GB flash drive.

Right now, without the 500GB drives, the file server idles at 31W.
Click to expand...

what kind of motherboard are you using? The handful of desktop boards I've seen that take mobile chips generally only have 2 sata ports..
 
deuce868 said:
I've just bought the parts to do something like this based off of this guy's article:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=829

It's not ultra-low power, but really is down to lightbulb level which is nice for a file server.
Click to expand...
You just quoted Ou, in the Linux section even.

Obligatory flame from Duby in 3...2...1...

OP: Be careful when running with ideas involving mobile CPUs. Motherboards that take these CPUs are in very low demand, thus you'll end up paying a premium. Mobile CPU prices also tend to be higher than their desktop counterparts. You could end up paying a lot of money for what you could otherwise accomplish with aggressive undervolting and CPU frequency daemons.
 
TopGun said:
I just bought some of the finishing parts for my low power server, It's currently
a Celeron 733, 192mb ram and a 9gb hd. Had to see if the small heatsink I bought would cool it well enough. I'm looking foward to building a custom case or buying a small one and sticking a good amount of disk space. Since it's not anything that's going to be under huge load I figure I'll host my website off it, use it for storage and e-mail or something or other :p

-Best of luck with your
plan though, be sure to update us
as you go :)
Click to expand...

Last month I put togather something similar to what youre doing.
IBM Netvista S40 Case , PIII 800Mhz Pentium , Asus Cuwe-FX, 512mb PC100 , WD 80GB Hard and a 52x cdrom.

My intention was to use it as a Dyn ip personal web server , also so I could use to to learn more about nix administration , I originally put ubuntu server on there I just need to get ssh working and finish setting it up. I was considering changing the OS to FreeBSD.

I would be interested in seeing how your file server works out as I am pondering moving all my HDs to a linux machine.
 
I setup a Laptop with a ULV PIII 700 mobile as a linux server for a friend. It idles at 300, and kicks up less than once a week.

It has a gigabit PCMCIA card and a usb2 PCMCIA card with a pair of 320 GB external drives hanging on it. He loves it. Very low power requirements, it's silent, and as someone else mentioned built in UPS.
 
Sorry to somewhat hijack the thread, but i have a question. Would i be better off with a Via C3 900Mhz processor server, or my old PIII 700Mhz laptop for a low power consumption server?

Both would be hooked up to an external HDD for the storage space.
 
spotdog14 said:
Sorry to somewhat hijack the thread, but i have a question. Would i be better off with a Via C3 900Mhz processor server, or my old PIII 700Mhz laptop for a low power consumption server?

Both would be hooked up to an external HDD for the storage space.
Click to expand...

If you don't already have the VIA C3 setup, I would just go with the laptop route since you wouldn't have to spend the extra money on more hardware and you already have the PIII laptop.

The caveat with this would be the speed of the USB ports. It's unlikely that the PIII laptop has USB 2.0 ports built in which would seriously slow down any drive transfers. More than likely I would think a VIA C3 based motherboard would probably have USB 2.0 ports built in. The transfer rate between USB 1.1 and 2.0 is rather large and something you would want to take into account.

 
SmokeRngs said:
If you don't already have the VIA C3 setup, I would just go with the laptop route since you wouldn't have to spend the extra money on more hardware and you already have the PIII laptop.

The caveat with this would be the speed of the USB ports. It's unlikely that the PIII laptop has USB 2.0 ports built in which would seriously slow down any drive transfers. More than likely I would think a VIA C3 based motherboard would probably have USB 2.0 ports built in. The transfer rate between USB 1.1 and 2.0 is rather large and something you would want to take into account.

Click to expand...

USB 2.0 PCMCIA cards are very cheap. I've seen them go as low as $3 on eBay.
 
NewBlackDak said:
USB 2.0 PCMCIA cards are very cheap. I've seen them go as low as $3 on eBay.
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with laptop hardware and expansion options at all so I wasn't sure this would have been an option. Thanks for the clarification.

The only question I would have regarding the PCMCIA USB 2.0 card would be in regards to CPU usage during use. I'm sure it would depend on the quality of the card itself, but would it end up needing a powerful CPU to get the best USB 2.0 speeds even using the card? CPU usage on modern processors with the onboard USB 2.0 controllers is negligible in most cases, but with a PIII, it may not be so negligible. If it has to load the processor down a lot, it could negate some of the speed increases of USB 2.0. I don't know if this would be the case as I've obviously never tried it. I was just wondering if someone has done this before and can chime in concerning this.

 
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