[GRLUG] Net-top as server?

[Michael Mol]

Steve Romanow wrote:
> Ben Rousch wrote:
>>
>> My eeePC 901 gets 4.5 hours on battery. I'm not compiling kernels, but I
>> usually have Gnome, Ryhthmbox, Firefox with tabs open to Gmail, Gcal,
>> Facebook, and 1-5 other random pages, while also running Pidgin.
>>
>>   
> similar results with mini9.
> 
> Adam,  does your netbook have an hd or ssd?
> 
> Anyone consider SheevaPlug?  
> http://hackaday.com/2009/04/29/hackit-sheevaplug/

Never heard of it, but at 5W power consumption, that's only 43.8 kwh in 
a year.  Not bad at all.  Their Kirkwood series has GigE and SATA, so, 
with something like lighttpd, your throughput would only be limited by 
your choice of disk and filesystem.  The disk(s) would obviously have to 
have a separate power supply, but you could power them with something 
like a 300W 80+ PSU.  A little resourcefulness might turn up a way to 
efficiently power a large SSD.

At 5W for the core unit, though, you have to look hard at your storage 
media and weight performance against power consumption there.  You might 
be able to get tricky and use Squid as an accelerator, caching 
frequently-used files in RAM.

But that's all from the perspective of speeding up file serving, not so 
much uploading and the like. (Though I imagine you could use SFTP or 
WebDAV for puts.)