[nzlug] Energy saving Linux

[Marvin Pascual]

Hello Raimund,

On 8/15/07, Raimund Eimann <raimund at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to cut my electricity costs and am considering to replace a Compaq
> ML370 with a less energy hungry piece of equipment. Basically, the ML370 runs
> LAMP+BiIND9+dhcpd+Squid (+iptables, of course). Are there any routers or WLAN
> access points around that would be able to run these apps on top of Linux?
>
> I've got a Belkin F5D7230-4 WLAN access point which apparently runs Linux 2.4,
> but the last thing I've heard is that it's flash memory is too small to do
> anything reasonable with it...

My server here is an old Celestix Taurus similar to
http://cogitoimage.com.sg/_help/Welcome.htm running Debian GNU/Linux
Etch with an Intel Celeron 1Ghz, 512MB RAM, 250GB HDD, Digium's
TDM400P and PCMCIA WLAN.  This server runs as the web server
(LigHTTPD), PBX (Asterisk), access point (MadWiFi), audio player (MPD
and PitchFork), database server (MySQL), VPN (OpenVPN) and of course,
SSH (OpenSSH).  The good thing with this old server is that it only
consumes of up to 40 Watts AFAIK.

Now in your case, you might take a look at [1] Apple's Mac Mini or [2]
AOpen's miniPC if you think they're good enough for your needs.  I
don't know how much wattage does the Apple Mac Mini uses but for
AOpen's miniPC, it uses 90 watts.  I don't know what other vendors
that sells barebone PCs with a reliable power supply and consumes of
not more than 100 watts.

For your LAMP needs, I recommend you NOT to use Apache as your web
server.  [3] LigHTTPD is good enough.  If possible, do not use MySQL
also.  Instead, use SQLite3.  I was forced to use MySQL because
WordPress only supports MySQL.  I can't find a good replacement to
WordPress that uses SQLite3 as its database backend.

For the Bind9 and DHCPD, I recommend you to replace it with [4]
DNSMasq.  If you need to host your own domain name, go to
http://freedns.afraid.org/ because they provide FREE DNS, Dynamic DNS,
Static DNS subdomain and domain hosting.  FreeDNS is the one who host
my domain name.

For your Squid, use [5] Privoxy instead.

HTH.

[1] http://www.apple.com/macmini/
[2] http://minipc.aopen.com/Global/
[3] http://www.lighttpd.net/
[4] http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html
[5] http://www.privoxy.org/

-- 
MARVIN T. PASCUAL
Mobile No. +65 9779 6078
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E-Mail: marvin AT pascual DOT com DOT ph
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