Revision of Choose the right computer, to use as a server from Mon, 12/16/2013 - 00:00
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1. Desktop, notebook, netbook, or Single-Board-Computer
1.1 Desktop PC
Desktop PC vs notebook computer/netbook:
"All my desktops have at least two disks in RAID1 (mdraid on old systems,
btrfs raid1 on newer ones: it won't copy corrupted data to the other
disk, since it has checksums). It's not practical with a netbook. " -- Michał Masłowski
1.2 Notebooks and netbooks
Netbooks don't have extra bays for harddrives. Notebooks might. I'm not sure if external harddrives will work in the way that Michal set up his desktop PC server -- he did say attempting this with a netbook could be difficult.
1.3 Single Board Computers
Be careful about choosing a single-board-computer. None will work without proprietary software (as of 15 Dec 2013). Some require proprietary software for very basic things, and so are unusable. Others demand proprietary software for peripheral features like wifi.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
2. Which parts should I look out for?
Any computer will work as a server
Processor speed does not matter much, if you have just a few users. You may need a better processor if you will do complex spam filtering.
You probably won't need a strong processor if you use all three of these, to filter spam:
###postscreen
###postgrey
###SPF policy daemon
Graphics processors / video cards are not relevant for servers.
3. Power consumption
"Well, higher power usage means it will
*cost more
*get hotter
*get louder if it has a fan
Depending on the usage of the server, you might be more interested in either power usage when idle or power usage when operating at maximum speed." -- lembas
"I'd recommend enabling the CPU frequency scaling and whatever other power saving you can. 90% of the time a home server isn't doing much, might as well keep it cool. =p
Netbooks make excellent servers, unless you're running something heavy." -- dudeski
The page on battery life has some suggestions that may be relevant for saving electricity with servers:
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/optimizing-battery-time
Citations:
Michał Masłowski:
http://listas.trisquel.info/pipermail/trisquel-users/2013-December/030567.html
lembas
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/how-choose-server-hardware
dudeski
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/how-choose-server-hardware
