[ILUG] Looking for a small, quiet server device.

[Brendan Minish]

On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 11:29 +0100, Darragh wrote:
> Good morning.  

<SNIP>

> 
> If absolutely necessary, I could configure this functionality on a
> normal PC but I'm still not as skilled at this than most of you and
> I've only about two and a half weeks to get this up and running. 

My strong recommendation for this would be clarkconnect, I think it
ticks all your boxes and is especially designed for this very role. It's
dead easy to install & manage.
It's based on Centos.
http://www.clarkconnect.com/


Hardware wise anything P2 class or better with 128M or more (more is
better if using squid) of ram will be fine, so choose something old and
quiet to run it on out of a skip some place, along with a spare. Clean
it up carefully with a hoover (so that it runs cooler)  perhaps treat it
to a hard disk that is less than 3 years old, or even 2 in mirroring
RAID.

People are a bit hung up on energy conservation and other greenwash..
Lots of offices seem to heated with storage heaters, the ambient heat
generated by running pc(s) is just deducted from the energy budget of
the storage heaters (or other heating system) for much of the year. 
If it's a green issue consider the embodied manufacturing energy in a PC
and it soon becomes clear that getting as long a useful life as possible
is the greenest option.. 

OR build a nice low power fanless via based box with bits from
http://linitx.com/ 

.brendan