Hi, I'm looking for ways to cut power consumption on a homeserver that serves files and email through IMAP. Maybe in a distant future it will be a small webserver as well, but not right now. The most important tasks it fulfills now are:
- provide ssh access - retrieve email from POP3 accounts with fetchmail - provide email though courier-imap - serve files over samba The current machine is an AMD K6-233MHz with 64MB and one 120G disc, running Debian stable for years (now Sarge). Unfortunately, the cpu has a bug, where it becomes unstable under stress (i.e. compiling a kernel) when using more than 32MB of RAM. Since I have the need to use this server a bit more extensively than I have, I'm pondering an upgrade. Because I want to keep the power consumption relatively low, I looked at VIA Epia solutions. Sadly, VIA doesn't make many boards with SATA, and the ones that have the 8237 southbridge only have one LAN port. This means I have to spend the PCI slot on another NIC. So I scratched that idea, and I am now looking at the following: Asus P4C800 Deluxe Asus CT-479 (479->478 socket convertor) Intel Pentium M 740 (Dothan 2MB 1.7Ghz(?)) 256MB PC2100 S3 Virge 64 something PCI videocard (really, really old card) USB stick A few HDDs, probably 4 to start with. The motherboard, cpu and memory can probably compete with my current setup in power consumption. However, I would like the drives to spin down as much as possible. Naturally, a lot of system logging is going on. I am pondering if it would be a viable idea to move /var/log to a mounted USB stick. This would cut down on disc access drastically, but there's still stuff like fetchmail to keep the disc busy, and cron jobs. Is there a systematic way to track disc access and/or keep this to a minimum? Regards, Arjen Verweij -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
