Do it Yourself 1U Half-Width Server

Erasei writes "After talking about making my own rack mount case, a friend of mine sent me this link of a 1U Halfwidth rack-mount server. Complete with its own LCD display and Compact Flash slot, its one sweet little server for the price, near nothing." This is really impressive work. A box like that could be a great little inexpensive MP3 server or something. Very cool.

Wow

Taco has found the 1256th thing he thinks would make a good MP3 device.

Google Cache

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://1u.hom eip.net/ [google.com]

Yeah, cry "karma whore" all you fucking want to...

Crusoe and Heat consumption

A while back there was mention of using Transmeta's Crusoe processor for server applications like this... It would seem to be a very good solution, because once you start packing servers together this closely, heat and powerconsumption (California redux? :) becomes a major major issue.

Has anyone else heard anything more about this, or has Transmeta stopped pushing this? Wouldn't it be nice to have a 4 way transmeta in a half U space? :)

-Chris [nondot.org]

./ already

Damn that didn't take long. I really think as a service Slashdot should mirror webpages of the most recent articles.

Anyway does this thing look anygood? or is it still Vaporware?

Runestar

damn..

It's already slashdotted. I hope the site wasn't demonstrating the awesome power of the 1u half-width server by running on one...

Cute, but not practical

Ya, its 1.75inches high, and yes, it is only half the width of a rack. But c'mon. A 486? You can get an SBC (Single Board Computers) that are credit card sized (as previous /. articles have pointed out). Having 84 of these in a full sized rack would prolly be the equivilant of 2-3 dual PIII/800 rack servers......

Sure, this is cheap, but only if your time is worth little. Yes, it has geek value, but Geek value is becoming harder to obtain, as most of this has already been done..............

Damn, need more coffee.

Flash RAM != reliable

In a rack, hard disks shouldn't be "fragile". OTOH, flash memory wears out after some number of thousands of writes. So much for /tmp...

Expensive

I was going to build one once, but i found the most expensive part was an LCD screen (not one of those crappy 2 line lcd displays). That, and very few companies actually sell empty 1U cases.

Re:Expensive

Well, they made their own case. Saved a bundle of money. Rack mound cases are horridly expensive. They did use one of those 2 line lcd displays (or maybe 4 lines, not much whatever).

get back to work :)

Speaking as Erasei's boss, I think he should really be getting back to work and not spending his time submitting stories to slashdot!

( Just kidding, btw )
-Erasei's Boss

P.S. Please disregard the photos on his website. I submit to being under the influence of Redbull at the time and claim temporary insanity.

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mirror

Here's my mirror, on a relatively high-availability server: http://www.perljam.net/misc/1u/wtarreau.free.fr/1u / [perljam.net] I don't have the additional images- deal with it. -ted

/. effect is bad for friendship

a friend of mine sent me this link of a 1U Halfwidth rack-mount server

Now that the server is slashdotted, is he still your friend?

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I beg to differ...

It is next to impossible to play mp3's on a 486 and instead of a hard drive they are using flash so you can fit like 10 songs maybe?

I currently have a 486 laptop with 20meg of RAM running Debian 2.2r2. It plays .mp3 files with a recompiled mpg123 under X just fine.

Now I will grant you the hard drive issue. You need some kind of large media for storing .mp3 files. However a 486 will play them just fine as long as you have very little overhead.



The Tick - "Spoon!"

NEO - "There is no spoon."

Not that much of an innovation, though

Is it just me or is there no real innovation in this piece of hardware?

All it says is "Get yourself a server in whatever shape you like! Simply ummage through your old hardware, get components for one computer, build yourself a case in the desired shape, and install Linux". Of course, this is a recipe for a 100% customized server running Linux, but it's not really the innovation of the century.

Seeing that they even left out the interesting parts, such as the software for the LC display, I'm sort of disappointed. I'm running a custom FreeBSD server in a custom case myself, now should I post it everywhere for geeks to look at?

I didn't know about the CompactFlash IDE hacks, though. Seeing the current prices for CompactFlash cards, however, this is not an option either.

Summary: So What?

Flash RAM is very reliable

Actually FLASH ram drives can be quite reliable. What you do is mount your root read only them make a ram disk to mount /tmp on. Do the same for any partition you need to do writes in. If you need more space than your flash card has you can do the trick they do on boot floppies and compress the root partition and load it into a ram disk. Sure this burns more ram, but then how much ram does a router need? 32MB should do just fine for most routers. I only have 16MB in mine. If you had 64MB or 128MB of memory in the system, you would have plenty for the OS and a sizeable ram disk.

I've been looking at doing something along the same lines for my firewall and web server. For the web server I'd use 2 raided 80GB hard disks and not use a flash disk, but the firewall would be run off of one. The main reason I'm looking at this is power consumption. Right now I'm sucking down about 200 Watts between the firewall and web server. If figure I could lower this to less than 50watts total for both.

Google Cache Page

Get it here [google.com] via Google, but without pictures.

WebWord [webword.com] -- Industrial Strength Usabiltity