An Embedded Server?

I decided to start creating a server for use in the field. My goals are low power consumption, with hope of running of off 12v solar generated power, as is done by WFU's David Anderson, Miles Silman, William Smith and their colleagues at field stations in the Galapagos, Peru, and various Alpine environments. I still have many issues to work out, but this is my first attempt.

Goals

• Low power consumption
• Few or no moving parts
• Linux OS
• MySQL, Apache, Perl, PHP based applications
• 802.11x wireless connectivity

This little box

(its not a server, but a toy)

I decided to start creating this computer, with no funding, since it is my own personal interest to create such a device to serve as an augmentation to home electronics (and my absolute loathing of cooling fan noise!).

I decided to gut an old Sun Sparc. It serves as an interesting case for the time being. Note the funky USB rubber floppy keyboard. It would work great outside, as well as resist my habit of spilling coffee and sodas on my keyboards!

Eventually, I will have to find some sort of hermetically sealed case for the Rain Forest crew.

Yes, a Sparc Classic it is! Thanks to my friends at the Med School. Note: this was a non-working machine, since gutting a working Sun would be considered a sin.

Ok... what's really inside is a rather underpowered Mercury motherboard with a Via C3 Gigapro chip running at 700MHz. It has very low power consumption on the order of 8-15 watts (haven't verified this yet). Note that the computer is passively cooled (no need for a fan). The internal temperature is 38-40 degrees C while running X and Mozilla (room ambient was 20 degrees C). The manufacturer suggests that I should be able to run this thing as hot as 80 degrees C safely.

The target motherboard will eventually be a fanless Ezra MiniITX with integrated sound, video, and network. For now, this should satisfy some of the requirements and is pretty cheap at $50-$60 which includes the CPU. I have added a generic NE2000 network card, but will replace this with a PCI wireless NIC.

The "Mass Storage" Device

Tres cool! A compact-flash card serving as an IDE hard disk. 512MB is fairly expensive now--$150 but will only get better in the future. I would love to get my hands on a 2GB card.

I was warned by those more learned than I to NOT put a swap partition on a CF device. I can understand why they said this.

I had enough space on the card to install a 2.4 kernel Linux. I used Mandrake 9.1 it could have easily been Debian Woody or RH 8.

My mentor and one of the original Samba Team, John Terpstra, said he would personally kick my a$$ if he ever discovered I was running X on a server box! John, if you read this, it was just a test, only a test!

Really, I wanted to test this box to see how X would run on such a meager architecture.As you predicted, it is slow, but still servicable! The boot up times are very slow. The speed compares to an 8x CDROM maybe.

Look Ma, its Mozilla! The shell in the x-term shows "top" running and if you can make out the fuzzy picture, you will discover that I have no swap partition.

installed packages:

• GCC/C++
• Samba
• open SSH
• iptables
• Xfree86
• IceWM
• Mozilla

# df -h
Filesystem Size  Used  Avail    Use% Mounted on
 /dev/hda1  474M 287M 163M   64%        /
          

Much more to come later!

m u d a y j a @ w f u . e d u