[clug] Sheeva Plug (linux Digest, Vol 96, Issue 14, Message 2)

[Miles Goodhew]

Carlo/Rabble,
  I know I'm late on the scene again, but I've been bursting with
desire to bore someone about my new mini-server thingamy and your
Sheeva Plug plight seemed like a good enough excuse to cruise the
streets with it.
  It's probably bigger and power-hungrier than what you're after, but
it's still in the same class. I just got an Intel D510M0 Mini-ITX
motherboard, which is ridiculously cheap: They can be delivered in the
US for US$80 rrp (There was a $65 special I just missed-out on too).
So that's most of a pretty decent server (Sans power, case and memory)
for under a hundred bucks.
  The CPU is a dual-core 1.66MHz Atom with VT-x, x86 and
Hyperthreading (Which might actually do something useful, depending on
who you talk to). More importantly IMHO, things it DOESN'T have:
"turbo boost" (The ability to use much more power for a small amount
of MHz gain if the CPU's cool enough).
  Unfortunately I can't get consistent figures out of my inline
wattmeter (Oscillates between 7 and 32W), but it seems to draw about
the same amount of power the server it's replacing does: A 1.3MHz Via
Eden @~21W. If you want to go stats crazy, you could arguably claim
the new server could have in the region of 16x the processing power of
the old one (Though I'd reckon it's really something more-like 4x)
  I stuck it in a Mini-Box M350 case
(http://www.mini-box.com/M350-enclosure-with-picoPSU-80-and-60W-adapter
- no affiliation), which is an amazingly solid little case with LOTS
of ventilation. One downside I didn't notice on purchase is this case
is so small, there's no room for a 3.5" drive (One of the main tasks
of the server), let alone any PCI-card backplane. As it is, It's
booting off a 8G eSata thumbdrive stuffed behind the front-panel &
wired though the fan-hole.
  I hope to eventually do some virtual-server hosting on this -
currently it's only got 2G of the max 4G memory installed and is
ticking-along doing distributed.net chores using 1/3 of the RAM and no
swap.

  Anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

M0les.

-- 
Miles Goodhew,
Does something with computers.