Date   : Sat, 11 Mar 2006 13:54:44 GMT
From   : Philip Pemberton <philpem@...>
Subject: Re: Them pesky case stickers (was 1MHZ SCSI/ATA board.)

In message <007f01c64487$f3ed0b70$3201a8c0@...>
          "David Hunt" <dm.hunt@...> wrote:

> Electricity and gas are going up in price again, so it's probably worth
> investing in something like this myself. The item that consumes the most
> power, I reckon, is the fridge-freezer. Then closely followed by the
> dehumidifier, PC (HAL - especially when playing games), TV etc...

That's half the reason I've bought a Linksys NSLU2. 2A at 5V (10W), 133MHz
(well, 266 if you remove the clock-locking resistor) Intel IXP400 XScale
(ARMv5te) CPU, Ethernet, 2x USB. Adding on another 15W for the hard drive
gives 25W total. Now we assume the switchmode PSUs are horribly inefficient,
e.g. about 50%. That gives about 50W absolute worst-case power consumption,
or more likely closer to 35W off the AC.

Considering the fact my old PC router routinely chewed 160 to 200W, I think
that's pretty good going. At the moment I'm running Postfix (SMTP), Dovecot
(IMAP and POP3), Bogofilter (rather crappy spam filtering), CUPS (print
server) and Fetchmail (POP3 fetcher) on the NSLU2 and it's running at a load
average of 2.0. The Ethernet driver busywaits, so subtract about 1.0 from
that to get something closer to the load averages you see on most x86 kit.

One of these days I'm going to build some form of power bus strip with a
built in 5V/5A + 12V/3A PSU, then chain all the devices off that. That should
free up a few mains sockets... I could probably fit an SLA battery to it as
well and make a primitive UPS for the servers... Hmm...

Word of warning: If you're going to use an NSLU2 as a server, grab the
Openslug beta with the 2.6.16rc4 kernel from Openembedded and build it.
2.6.15-1 has a nasty bug that makes the kernel deadlock after the machine's
been up for about 6-20 hours.

It's nice to be able to put a few .torrent files (for Linux ISOs, I swear!)
onto the NSLU's hard drive and leave them downloading overnight. The lack of
noisy cooling fans is also a big plus.

-- 
Phil.                         | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G ViewFinder
philpem@...                   | Cheetah: Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxeV2 512M+100G
http://www.philpem.me.uk/     | Tiger: Toshiba SatPro4600 Celeron700 256M+40G