[Server-devel] Recommended tropical island XS hardware

[Andra DuPont]

On Feb 3, 2011, at 6:31 AM, Tom Parker wrote:

> Is there a "recommended" school server hardware these days?
> 
> We took EEE Boxes to Samoa and they seemed to do ok in the short time we
> monitored them. Their biggest downside is no second ethernet (you have
> to use USB) and you pay for the Ion chipset (both upfront and on power
> consumption).
> 
> The schools in question are probably less than 200 students each, so I'm
> guessing an Atom processor will be ok?
> 
> There are a few people building fanless no-name boxes based on the Intel
> D510MO motherboards. I'm running one of those very successfully as my
> own server, with a 3.5" harddrive it consumes about 25W when powered by
> a wide input PicoPSU and HP Laptop brick (35W with a no-name desktop
> power supply!). Is anyone running a schoolserver with one of these? How
> many students is it good for?

Tom
I have deployed two servers using netbooks. One is an Acer Aspire One 532h and
the other is an Asus Eee PC 1005PEB. Both are using the Atom 450 processor at
~1.67 Ghz with 1 GB ram. I put 500 GB hard drives in each, which added $75.
They cost about $325 after hard drive upgrade. They consume about 10W. They of
course do have fans, and it will be some time before I can give you a reliability report.
They are being used in a dry (almost desert like) area of Kenya, and they are in a mud
wall building with a metal roof that stays fairly warm ~90 F. So far, so good. This is not
"recommended" hardware per se, but it is cost effective and low power.

I had some minor work to get the ethernet NIC to work (add a driver), and a quick
modification to the /boot/grub/ menu.lst file so that the screen brightness would work
on the Asus. Let me know if you are interested or have questions.

Andy

> 
> The smallest cases don't take a PCI card (low profile or otherwise) so
> the second ethernet port is still a problem. This
> http://www.bvm-store.com/ProductDetail.asp?fdProductId=547 might work I
> guess? 
> 
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