rebuilt server
Long post because I like to geek out over this sort of thing.
I'm in the process of rebuilding the shiftleft.org server, meringue, into a smaller, more power-efficient machine, with the goal of moving it out of my apartment into someone's closet or something. I'm using an M350 case and a pair of notebook hard drives for storage. Because of the way the dual hard-drive mounts look, and because I like dumb puns, I'm calling it “catameringue”.
I've had a few problems so far. First up, I got a 24-pin PSU by mistake instead of the 20-pin version, so the whole thing is currently hooked up to a ginormous ATX PSU. I botched the install (turns out the Hardy /etc/passwd and my earlier Ubuntu /etc/passwd have different UIDs for certain daemons...) and it took me several hours to figure out what was wrong and correct the problem. So that's why the server was down for an evening. What's more, there are lignering stability issues. They might be caused by powernowd, which doesn't meaningfully reduce power consumption anyway, so I've turned it off.
But my biggest concern is cooling. The combination of the M350, EPIA EN12000EG and two hard drives seems like a cooling nightmare:
- The EN12000EG is fanless, but the whole system draws more than 10 watts (if only barely... it's sucking 24 from the wall at idle, but that's through a 380W desktop PSU), which is supposed to be the limit for fanless operation of the M350.
- The hard drives block almost all the top ventillation of the M350. I consider this a serious design flaw of the M350; if it didn't have that solid stripe down the middle, cooling in this configuration would be significantly easier.
- The M350 has a fan mounting slot, but it's perpendicular to the fins of the motherboard heat sink, and even before that it's blocked by the RAM. Right now it adds a ton of noise and reduces the temperature by maybe a degree or two, so I've unplugged it. Low-profile RAM might help here.
- If the M350 supported a tower setup, the heat sink would be vertical and unobstructed, and air could flow very nicely through all the hot spots by convection alone. But it doesn't, and it'd need a big standoff anyway to get airflow through the bottom. It also doesn't support side-mounted fans, which would achieve this without the tower mounting.
Right now it has the top of the case off to accomodate the huge desktop PSU, and despite all of the above it keeps plenty cool with no fan. The northbridge temperature hits 60°C under load (CPU temperature tops out at 44°C), which is fine. But once the case cover is on, who knows? I suppose I could jury-rig it with tower mounting, side fans or no case lid, but this seems like a big hack for a new machine.
If I really can't get it to work, I'll have to either remove one of the hard drives (not sure what RAID 1 is getting me anyway) or get a more efficient motherboard, or both.
Pics will occur when it's done. It's a shame I didn't get any of the machine hooked up to an external hard drive, external DVD drive and ATX PSU; the DVD drive and PSU are each almost as big as the entire case.