[sclug] Cheap low-end servers

[lug at assursys.co.uk]

Hi David -

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, David Given wrote:

> Hey, look, I'm still subscribed to the mailing list. Yes, I know I haven't 
> really done anything or been to a meeting or even said anything for the best 
> part of a year, but hey, I'm still subscribed...

...and still alive, even, which is good to know. ;-)

> I've just moved house. I now have an ADSL connection with the excellent A&A 
> ISP, and am now legally allowed to run servers. (As opposed to my old NTL 
> connection, where I wasn't, but did anyway.) My server, tiar (a.k.a 
> gate.cowlark.com) is currently a P166 Pentium with 48MB of RAM, and is 
> definitely showing its age.
> 
> (For example, while it does really well at shuffling email via SMTP, I've just 
> installed the Neomail webmail package. This takes several seconds to do 
> *anything*, just for the time it takes to load and parse the perl script.)
> 
> So, can anyone suggest where I might be able to get a new server? Cheap, 
> small, quiet, low power.

Some of the guys in the Bristol LUG have a thing for a) mini-ITX machines
using VIA CPUs and b) <http://www.soekris.com/> boxes.

It has to be said though, that sadly, they're not not very
flexible/expandable and they're not actually cheaper than a Celeron desktop
with a reasonable, ASUS/GigaByte all-in-one ATX motherboard.

Well, maybe if you take power consumption into account... over a year or
ten.

> tiar is currently a laptop. I like laptops for servers. They're low power, low 
> footprint, quiet, and have a builtin UPS. They don't need a seperate keyboard 
> and mouse. Ideally I would like to keep using a laptop, but upgrade to 
> something in the three or four hundred megahertz range and space for a few 
> hundred megs of RAM.
> 
> I also need at least two PCMCIA slots. USB a bonus, Firewire a bonus, built-in 
> ethernet would be really, really nice because that would free up a PCMCIA 
> slot. More than one drive bay would be a godsend.
> 
> Can anyone suggest anything, or suggest where I might be able to look?

Morgan is probably the place for cheap, reasonable laptops
<www.morgancomputers.co.uk/>. Aw, hell, laptops are (relatively) cheap
everywhere these days.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>