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Recommendations for miniture linux pc (perhaps with linuxbios?)

I'm thinking of putting together a small linux server for my home network. The sort of things I want to run on it are firewalling, a vpn, mail server, web server, and maybe a few other bits and pieces. It's going to be low traffic (for example, I want to host a website and mailing list for my wife's horse club), so I don't need a lot of power. I'm quite happy setting all this up, but I'm looking for something physically smaller and far quiter (i.e., no fans, and a hard disk that powers-off when not needed) than the dinosaur (P166) pc's that I've been playing with so far.

What I'm looking for, therefore, will be a small board using something like an NS Geode or VIA processor, with perhaps 256 MB ram (to get more caching, and therefore less disk usage), and two ethernet ports. Display, keyboard and mouse support are fairly irrelevant - I'll only use them to get the system up and running.

Also, does anyone here have experiance with linuxbios? It certainly sounds like a nice project, but I guess it won't be of particular benifit here (I'm not bothered about boot-times on an always-on server :-)

Any recommendations or useful websites would be much appreciated.

-- David

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go past." Douglas Adams

Reply to
David Brown
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"David Brown" schrubbelte:

You could check our Cool EcoRunner -- Geode GX1, 300MHz, up to 512 MB,

2 Ethernet ports:
formatting link

-peter

Reply to
Peter Kannegiesser

Personally, I'd go for a laptop from ebay. Ones with busted screens, missing keyboards go for peanuts. USB2 is nice - as it's easier to extend.

Reply to
Ian Stirling

I'm using a so-called "thin client" which I was able to obtain from Ebay for some 40 Euros. There are various brands, but typically, these are basically small all-in-one PCs with no fan or any other moving parts. Mine has a Geode@233Mhz and 64MB of 168-pin RAM (easily upgradeable). Instead of a harddisk, it has a "disk on module" (basically a compact flash which plugs directly into the IDE connector). This is fully software compatible to a standard IDE drive, so one could in fact attach a "real" IDE drive instead. But then again, CFs are available these days with 512MB or even 1GB capacity, plus they don't make any noise :-). The only drawback was that it has only one ethernet port, but it does have a USB interface, so I used a USB->Ethernet adapter (also very cheap on Ebay ...).

Of course, you could probably buy a device like this off the shelf, and, taking into account the hours I spent to set it up, it would probably cheaper. But it is definitely a fun do-it-yourself project, plus in the end you know exactly what the box is doing.

Cheers

Rob

--
Robert Kaiser                     email: rkaiser AT sysgo DOT com
SYSGO AG                          http://www.elinos.com
Klein-Winternheim / Germany       http://www.sysgo.com
Reply to
Robert Kaiser

For example, the compaq ia2 has Geode GX1 at 255 and 2 banks of DIMM (256M max. each), so it can goes up to 512M.

It has a 40 pins DIP Disk on Chip pus a 40 pins IDE connector.

The only problem is the power supply. Since they are not designed for hard disk, you can burn out the internal power supply.

Actually, 4G to 8G are coming.

If you decide to try it, we can provide you all the necessary tools and instructions.

see

formatting link

Reply to
Linnix

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