For a number of years this blog (and three others) have been served from an IBM Intellistation workstation of 1998 vintage. Today I moved them all to a different server that I hope will be their home for at least as long.

The IBM is a workhorse machine with a 600 MHz Pentium III running Solaris x86 9.0. I have never had unplanned downtime on that machine, except when the dog pulled out the power cord. 200 days of uptime was routine.

I’ve now moved everything to a box based in a VIA ME6000 motherboard. This board is about 7 inches square (Mini-ITX form factor), and has a 600 MHz Via Eden C3 processor and no fans. It’s installed in a Cubid/Morex case that is 11-1/2 by 10-3/4 by 2-1/2 inches, with a 512MB stick of PC2100 SDRAM. It has an external power supply and two 40mm case fans, which are not connected to the power supply – it seems to run fine without them. An old IBM 4GB laptop drive is in the drive bay, its vibrations isolated by suspending it in a web of 1/8 inch shock cord I bought at REI. This system is very quiet.

For an OS I’m using CentOS 4.3, a Red Hat Enterprise Linus 4.0 clone that comes in an i586 version, which is necessary for the C3 processor. Given the great performance of Solaris 9 I would have liked to have used Solaris 10, a superior operating system which is also available free, but I didn’t have time to mess around with the install procedure. I actually got as far has having Solaris 10 installed on the new system, but none of the open source components I need were included in the minimal network install, and all the other options were too big for my 4GB drive. With CentOS I was able to follow Johnny Hughes’ easy guide to installing a LAMP server. This gave me a a minimal install that has everything I need and nothing else, with almost no glitches.

The Kill A Watt showed the old system using about 71-72 watts on idle (its usual state). The new box uses 20. This is 70% less power, and at current commercial rates will save me about $100 a year in electrical costs.

So the new system has about the same processing power and twice the memory of the old in less than 1/8 the volume, and uses only 28% as much electrical power.