Using Atom for server?

GhettoBSD

GhettoBSD

So, my web host and domain provider is closing down shop. I am going to host all services myself again. I have quite a few sites I need to throw up, none with a lot of traffic.

So my idea is to help my buddy save on his power bill (he'll be hosting it for me from his home) and run it on a low power cpu.

This is the most all in one package I found: SUPERMICRO SYS-5015A-H 1U Barebone Server Intel 945GC Intel Atom 330 Dual-Core 1.6GHz processor and with 2GB and 1.5TB comes out to ~$400.

What else could you recommend that is similar? I've seen the plug in computers, but they have very little ram. I've seen the embedded systems and those too don't seem like they'll have what it takes.

What I need now is the basic to just get all domains, mail apache, bind, ssh etc running. Then I'll look into adding HDDs to it. I would also like to keep it as low power as possible.

The reason I'd like to go low power is that before I used to do it all with 5 desktops converted into servers and that ended up being a little expensive. So eventually I moved them over to a co-located host. Those computers consisted of: 25, 33, 100, 133 and 500Mhz computers - now you know why it's called GhettoBSD! So this time around I'd like to do it all on 1 machine.



So, any recommendations would be appreciated!
 
I'm currently running a D510MO motherboard with 4GB RAM to serve a moderately popular web forum, blog and photo gallery as well as various ancillary services - an IRC server, anonymous FTP, mail w/IMAP, bind, rsync, etc.

It handles everything beautifully and actually provided a nice performance boost over the 8 processor SGI Origin 350 it replaced. The forum usually has between 10-20 people on it at any given time (plus 50 users on IRC and 5 or so on FTP) and the load on the machine rarely creeps above 0.05. I can even compile ports from source in the background without anyone noticing a performance hit.
 
Thanks for the quick reply. So I checked out that mobo, i noticed it doesn't have a fan on it's heatsink, have you experienced any heat issues at all? Also, how much disk space did you pack in there? Or did you leave a slot for a cd drive?

One last thing, what case are you using and would you recommend?

Thanks!
 
Atoms are extremely energy efficient and generally don't require any active cooling on the CPU - you shouldn't encounter any heat issues with them. The Supermicro you listed likely has a dedicated cooling fan for the 945GC chipset, but the Atom D510 doesn't require a power-hungy external north bridge solution. That's one of the really nice things about this board.

For storage, I currently have a 750GB SATA drive running in AHCI mode along with a SATA CD-ROM. The case is a Apex MI-100 which has space for one 5.25" and two 3.5" drives in the size of a shoebox. I've been extremely happy with this setup as a whole.
 
Hmm ok. I am leaning toward that d510 with the mi-008 case (I already have one for my HTPC with a zotac mobo).

Thanks for your input.

Anyone else have any suggestions?
 
I would go with the D510 system. The Supermicro system you pasted is based on the older gen Atom 330 which is why it needs a fan. The new Atoms are much more efficient.

Having said that, Supermicro do have D510 based systems in the pipeline too.
 
I'm currently using an older Atom + 945GC as a server. Its dirt cheap. All it needed was a decent NIC and hard drive.

It exceeds everything I require and most of what I want. The only time I find it lacking is when SCP'ing to/from it over a gigabit network. In that case you will find your CPU to be the bottleneck. The newer dual-core Atoms may be more suitable if you will be doing similar tasks.
 
I've used a couple of times a small device called "kill-a-watt" (about 25$ on Ebay) to measure actual energy consumption of servers, desktops, router, switch, etc. Very interesting.

For example, I've replaced an old rackmount 24 ports switch (70 watts) with a smaller 16 ports one (only 5 watts) since it was using more power than my Pentium III server (63 watts). My router is a Sunfire V100 box with OpenBSD (43 watts) and my main server is an AMD Opteron with 4 disks in RAID (100 watts).

The other thing is that, knowing the actual consumption of your server, you could estimate precisely the monthly or annual overhead of energy on your friend's electricity bill.
 
I use a similar device to ensure my UPS can handle the load I put on it for my desired duration. It also lets me input the cost of electricty, displaying how much I've "spent".

My atom box costs me ~$6 per year in electricity. ( =
 
Thank you for all your input gang. I will definitely go over all and compare to what I can get.

Have a great one!
 
Thanks for the great input everyone.

This is what I've ended up ordering:

- Intel BOXD510MO Intel Atom D510 Intel NM10 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
- 2GB of DDR2 800
- 750GB WDB HDD
- Scythe S-FLEX SFF21D 120mm
- Samsung cd/dvd burner
- APEX MI-008 Black Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case

All in all it comes out to about $305.20 shipped. I got everything that had free shipping except for the case (shipping was $13.99 but worth it because I know the case well now). Could have gotten cheaper RAM, HDD, 120mm case fan and optical drive but it will work out for me in the long run.

If I would have gotten the cheapest products available it would have come out to $258.24. So a few extra bucks was worth it.

I'm using the same case and 120mm fan as my HTPC, so I know It'll be even more quiet than that (which is practically inaudible) and will be cool.

got a cheap optical drive because it'll only really be used for installing the system, plus it'll be useful in the future for any odd reason.

I was bummed out because I found a jetway mobo that had the same specs but with a cooler fan for the cpu heatsink and 2 more sata ports. That would have worked out great as I could have built it up to have 4 HDD's for storage BUT it required an external power supply (I have no idea why they did that). So that was the deal breaker.

So now I'll have a tiny, quite and low power BSD box to throw everything on and that'll do the job for now until I get the main boxes back up or stop being cheap and buy a server. But then again, that wouldn't be GhettoBSD!


Thanks again everyone.
 
Sounds like a great setup!

Another option is to move your optical drive to a USB-based external case and reclaim the SATA port for a second drive. An acquaintance of mine did that for his D510MO build and said it worked nicely for him.
 
That could work, I have plenty of external enclosures. I could throw it up in the bay but would need one of those brackets. Might be worth it.

Thanks for the idea!
 
I considered Atom for my latest non-head build, but it fell through. Apart from lacking hardware virtualization support it also lacks ECC support, and that's where I draw the line.
 
GhettoBSD said:
Thanks for the great input everyone.

This is what I've ended up ordering:

- Intel BOXD510MO Intel Atom D510 Intel NM10 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
- 2GB of DDR2 800
- 750GB WDB HDD
- Scythe S-FLEX SFF21D 120mm
- Samsung cd/dvd burner
- APEX MI-008 Black Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case
Click to expand...

Funny... I had not seen this post and I just ordered almost the same items from newegg. Well, same mobo, case, and ram at least. :-) I look forward to putting FreeBSD on it.

I wonder how slow the D510 will be to compile ports and/or make buildworld?
 
chess said:
I wonder how slow the D510 will be to compile ports and/or make buildworld?
Click to expand...

It's not too bad. I haven't timed it, but buildworld certainly doesn't take all day, the way rebuilding the KDE or Gnome stuff does. :P

Maybe a couple of hours tops.

The D510 is dual-core (seen as four CPU's) so building ports can take advantage of the recent work to support parallel make jobs.
 
cracauer@ said:
I considered Atom for my latest non-head build, but it fell through. Apart from lacking hardware virtualization support it also lacks ECC support, and that's where I draw the line.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree, the lack of ECC support definitely rules out the Atoms for anything except casual home use.

But that's how I use them. :e
 
The systems only support 2 or 4GB of memory max.
My two systems in fact both use about 1GB with typical use.

ECC is nice for systems with 16GB of memory (And also USE that memory) and which are also critical systems. For casual 2-4GB RAM non-absolute-critical servers ECC is a bit overkill IMO.

I would go with the D510 system. The Supermicro system you pasted is based on the older gen Atom 330 which is why it needs a fan. The new Atoms are much more efficient.
Click to expand...

It's not that much more effecient, maybe 5W in casual use. 10W if you're very lucky. That'll save you a few dimes or maybe a euro/month ...
With two 2.5" hard disks in RAID-1 my 5015-H uses 30W avg...

Also, the new mainboard uses SO-DIMM's, and doesn't have a PCI slot...

You can probably remove the chipset fan on the supermicro board, I did so on mine. I did put it in a normal ATX case with two Nexus 120mm fans on 7V though. I would not recommend doing it in the 5015 rackmount case since there is almost no airflow what-so-ever.
 
So far it's working great. It's super silent, I attached the 120mm fan to the mobo fan port, so it's not running at full power although I did specify it to run at 100% in the bios. Will plug it direct to molex for more air flow (it'll still run silent as in my HTPC).

The only complaint I have so far is that the system won't boot without a monitor. I haven't had a chance to check out the manual (might be a setting somewhere) but other than that it's working great.

Have compiled basic things like apache and samba both without issue. I f'd up on perl (made some bad selections) so I undid that and started again without issues the second time around. Seems well enough to me. Comparing it to my 3 Ghz P4 with 2GB ram it's a tad bit slower, but it does seem that the dual cores with HT is working the best it can. Definitely boots up faster.

Using kill-a-watt these are the readings I have so far:
2 watts turned off
49 watts max during boot
37 watts idle

Most I've seen during operation is 39 watts. Will start moving files around and will keep an eye on it.

Oh and the reason I skipped the 4GB option is because it really doesn't need it. When I build the main box up again and host it from home it'll need more drives (something the d510 mobo's just can't provide easily at the moment).

But all in all, it's pretty awesome (space) and quick.
 
GhettoBSD said:
The only complain I have so far is that the system won't boot without a monitor. I haven't had a chance to check out the manual (might be a setting somewhere) but other than that it's working great.
Click to expand...

I've not seen a machine that won't start without a monitor. Is it possible you removed your keyboard and mouse when you removed the monitor? Check your BIOS to see if you have option to bypass errors when there's no keyboard or mouse.
 
ckester said:
It's not too bad. I haven't timed it, but buildworld certainly doesn't take all day, the way rebuilding the KDE or Gnome stuff does. :P

Maybe a couple of hours tops.
Click to expand...

Today I ran make buildworld for 8.0-STABLE. The total runtime for the build was two hours and 52 minutes. A little longer than my estimate, but still not too bad.

This was on a D510MO motherboard with 1GB of RAM. Your mileage might vary, depending on the speed of your hard drive, the amount of RAM, and the system load. (I was listening to podcasts in Amarok while the build was runnning.)
 
Thanks for the additional info. I got my Intel D510MO board, case, and ram and put it all together. After lots of hassle, I finally got 8-RELEASE installed (i386). The problem I was having is that no matter what I tried, I could not get anything to boot from a USB CD/DVD drive. I tried FreeBSD first, then Debian (stable and testing), then various others. I tried both i386 and amd64/x86_64 versions. The boot would appear to start, but then I'd all kinds of weird disk errors. I tried swapping out the hard drive, changing SATA cables, switching around BIOS settings, updating the BIOS ... nothing worked.

Finally, I found a post in the Intel forums from a user with similar issues who discovered that this board had trouble booting from USB CD/DVD drives. He used a USB stick to install instead.

So, I grabbed the FreeBSD 8 memstick, dd'd it onto a USB stick, and voila, perfect boot and install.

Hopefully, this helps someone else who may be pulling their hair out
 
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