Update on the server revamping, et al.
Well, between the dental drama, a few other money-type commitments, and the sometimes-iffy availability of the hardware itself, I think I’ll wait on the Kurobox. Still looking for something smaller/quieter/more energy efficient, though.
Today, while digging through shelves at the office I stumbled across an unused “bronze keyboard” Powerbook that appears to be in good condition. The wheels got turning, and I got to thinking about converting it to a home server. To do so, I will need to purchase a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card and either an external enclosure for the existing PATA drive, an external enclosure + new SATA or PATA hard drive, or a new external HDD.
Big advantages of this approach (relative to the Kurobox) are a lower necessary startup cost, a bit of flexibility (to change something, just open the lid and type), built-in power protection (batteries), and a surfeit of packages for the PPC platform.
Drawbacks relative to the Kurobox are the fact that the laptop batteries won’t protect the external drive from power loss, and the fact that the laptop on its own has a maximum power consumption of 45W compared to the Kurobox’s 17W. (Much of the laptop’s theoretical max would be devoted to using the CD-ROM, using the internal hard drive, and powering the LCD backlight; I intend to pull the CD-ROM after installation, and I plan on using the other two as little as possible. Doesn’t affect power usage on the external HD, though.) But while the Kurobox beats the laptop on those two fronts, the laptop is still a far cry better than the current system. Additionally, if I really want to take a Kuroboxy approach later on, I can do that and just put the laptop/external drive assembly someplace else as my offsite backup (duplicity, w00t).
of course, first i need to see if i can even have that laptop.
+++
Crunching with BOINC on a couple systems: my home laptop, Fred’s Mac mini, the home server, and my office workstation. Fred’s is the most recent addition to the mini-cluster, and so far I don’t think he’s noticed any difference in performance.
Also have MacFUSE and sshfs going on his computer. Essentially, now we both have secure wireless access to the home server — from home or elsewhere — and I can probably turn off netatalk and save a port and a few cycles.
+++
I have a post brewing about energy efficiency. Light bulbs are the easiest way to describe the economic benefits of efficiency, but I want to expand beyond how CFLs will save you money on your light bill. Since I’m not 100% certain how I’m going to achieve this, I’m going to set it on the back burner.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
