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Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 1:56 am
by lou1z
lol...... not if you have a diving cylinder!! just put pc on a table outside, turn on a quarter of a turn and watch that dust fly off to the big dustpile in the sky!! 10-15secs and it's done!
seriously, i used to have a p4 and cleaning the heatsink used to make a great difference to lessen the noise from the fans as they would gradually get faster to keep the processor cooler.

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 7:48 am
by jayrock
Ok, so here's my new server machine. When I built it I hadn't made up my mind whether to run WHS or alternatively Amahi with lots of VMs. ATM it's neither nor, but Amahi with very few (one) VM, so even the very small Core i3-530 is kind of overdimensioned.

The Gigabyte board has only 4x Sata which is some limitation, so I might throw in another Sata board in the future or use the USB3 connectors. I had the Zotac H55 ITX board before, but it was really poor so I returned it and got the Gigabyte instead.

Specs:
- Lian Li PC-Q08
- Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3
- Core i3-530
- Scythe SCSMZ-2000 Samurai ZZ with fan removed
- 2x2 GB of some Corsair RAM
- 2x 1TB Samsung F2, 1x 500 GB Samsung F1
- NEC BD / DVD combo
- Seasonic S12II-330, fan sucking air from the Samurai ZZ
- Power consumption: ~48W idle plus 5..10 W for each spinning HDD. Max about 75W

Clients:
- Win7 ITX / Core 2 Duo runnning MediaPortal
- Acer Timeline 1810TZ
- Asus EEE PC (an early one)
- Squeezebox Boom
- PS3
- Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro

L2/L3:
- Buffalo WZR-AGL300NH (since two hours ago actually ;-)
- Amahi server and MediaPortal client are hardwired, rest is wireless

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 11:24 am
by sgtfoo
Ok, so here's my new server machine. When I built it I hadn't made up my mind whether to run WHS or alternatively Amahi with lots of VMs. ATM it's neither nor, but Amahi with very few (one) VM, so even the very small Core i3-530 is kind of overdimensioned.

The Gigabyte board has only 4x Sata which is some limitation, so I might throw in another Sata board in the future or use the USB3 connectors. I had the Zotac H55 ITX board before, but it was really poor so I returned it and got the Gigabyte instead.

Specs:
- Lian Li PC-Q08
- Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3
- Core i3-530
- Scythe SCSMZ-2000 Samurai ZZ with fan removed
- 2x2 GB of some Corsair RAM
- 2x 1TB Samsung F2, 1x 500 GB Samsung F1
- NEC BD / DVD combo
- Seasonic S12II-330, fan sucking air from the Samurai ZZ
- Power consumption: ~48W idle plus 5..10 W for each spinning HDD. Max about 75W

Clients:
- Win7 ITX / Core 2 Duo runnning MediaPortal
- Acer Timeline 1810TZ
- Asus EEE PC (an early one)
- Squeezebox Boom
- PS3
- Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro

L2/L3:
- Buffalo WZR-AGL300NH (since two hours ago actually ;-)
- Amahi server and MediaPortal client are hardwired, rest is wireless
I like how small this is. So how many VMs are you running?
Is the CPU staying cold enough without that fan?? what kind of temps are you getting?

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 11:57 am
by jayrock
I like how small this is. So how many VMs are you running?
Is the CPU staying cold enough without that fan?? what kind of temps are you getting?
Thanks! It's indeed a very nice enclosure, and I like that it's expandable to 6 HDDs, even though I probably never going to have that many. To show the size of the case I attach one more picture of the full enclosure. (DVD case for comparison.)

Right now I'm running only one VM with MediaPortal TVServer, but that probably also has to go because I don't quite get the USB performance in VirtualBox I would need. I'm reluctant to test VMWare, I understand that you need to fiddle with the kernel to install it.

Temperatures were <30C maybe when the CPU is idle and up to 65C under full load, however I tested this with Windows 7. Under Linux I didn't do any extensive tests yet, but the temparatures seem to be similar. Maybe I'm going to put the CPU cooler fan back in, just to be save. Most of the noise comes from the HDDs anyway.

HDDs are between 20C and 30C when idle, depending mostly on the model. The 500G goes up to 35C when there is a lot of read/write activities.

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 10:15 am
by smccloud
Here's my Amahi box & my home network.

In the network diagra, from left to right are my Sprint Airave, my Amahi box, SamKnows.com router, Belkin Play N600HD Dual Band router running in AP mode, Brother HL-1440 Printer & behind the lava is my SMC cable modem (provided by my ISP).

Amahi specs are
  • Athlonx 64 x2 3800+
  • 4GB DDR400 RAM
  • ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard
  • Some crappy ATI video card
  • 5 port USB 2.0 card
  • Intel PCIe Gigabit NIC
  • Best Buy store brand PCIe eSATA card (has a SIL chip on it)
  • 3x WD 1TB Green HDs (/var/hda/files/drives/drive1,2,3)
  • 1x WD 750GB Green HD (/var/hda/files)
  • 1x Seagate 250GB HD (boot & /var/hda)
  • Artic Cooling Freezer 64 HSF
  • Antec Basiq Power 350 Watt PSU
I know the wiring sucks, but I need better SATA cables.

And my cell phone camera sucks :(

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 11:05 am
by vegaramos1
Nothing special here. My Amahi box is a Toshiba M55-S325, Pentium M 1.7 Ghz, with 1.5 GB of RAM. I've got two Western Digital 2 TB USB drives attached. I do plan on replacing it in the future with something more powerful, as I want to run XP in a virtual machine, and run PlayOn to stream Hulu to my TV's. I must say I'm loving my HDA.
server1 Large Web view.jpg
server1 Large Web view.jpg (94.19 KiB) Viewed 330755 times
server stowed Large Web view.jpg
Server when it is stowed away.
server stowed Large Web view.jpg (115.88 KiB) Viewed 330755 times

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 3:16 am
by lapinoid
i like the idea to use an old notebook as a server! never thought of it b4...

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2011 12:55 am
by inquam
I bought Scaleo and was running WHS on it for about a year. But after the announcement that MS would drop DE I decided to go with an idea I had had for a long time and installed Ubuntu Server on it. After configuring it all and being happy for two days I found out about Amahi and hade some whine while deciding what to do... I ended up whiping it again and installing Amahi :)
Since it's a headless server I have had to plug in a videocard using a PCIe 1x->16x converter more than once ;)

Image
Using external videocard requires some juice to teh card from my other computer :)

Image
Easily accessible components

Image
Ready to go

System
* Original Atom 1.6Ghz processor replaced with a DualCore E2200 (running at 2.4GHz if my memory doesn't fail me). Upgraded to be able to transcode movies to my 360. But now I have a HTPC running Boxee by the TV so the need is really not there any more.
* 2GB Ram
* 2x2TB Western Digital Green
* 2x1TB Western Digital Green
* 4x2TB Western Digital Green via eSata to external drive housing
* 1TB Western Digital via USB for nightly system partition backups (I had the system partition fail once and I just had to swap the backup drive in and it booted without any fiddling at all)

Excluding the external drives the system, when running WHS, used around 60W.

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:46 am
by moncapitaine
I got nearly the same as inquam above, so no need for photos ;-))
Only mine is called Intel SS4200-E, and I swiched the original 1.6 GHz Celeron for a Core2Duo E4500 (yes, passive cooling).
It's got 2GB RAM and 4 WD drives, 2 EADS 1GB, 1 EADS 2GB and 1 EVDS 2GB for system and gh landing zone.

It's quite small and very quiet, which is important because it's sitting under my desk.

Disadvantage: only 4 SATA ports, but 2 eSATA, does only support 2GB of RAM due to 945 Intel chipset.
Advantage: Low power consumption (like inquam said, about 60W) and low noise due to nice automatic fan speeds,
as it's made to be a small server. Headless, too.

Re: Show Us your home server

Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 9:20 am
by rbmattis
Image

I call it "Medusa's Nest"

This is before I will pretty it up and upgrade the ram this evening.

Specs:
P4 3ghz
1.5 gb DDR RAM
40 gb PATA drive
30 gb Vertex SSD
2x250 GB Western Digital Caviar Blue SATA
2x2TB Samsung F4 SATA
1 4-port Rosewell Sil 3114 PCI SATA controler
1 1-port PPA PCI SATA controller

Getting it operational was a pain... the DVD-ROM drive was a piece of junk and the machine did NOT like booting via USB.
Once I got it up, things have been fairly straight forward.