On 2015-01-09 10:24, Chris Green wrote:
On Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 10:20:16PM +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
On Wed, Jan 07, 2015 at 06:41:46PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
I am building a backup server machine and I'm trying to minimise its power requirements.
In that case do the sane thing and use an SSD which will use approximately sod all power or put the OS on a small partition at the front of the backup disks and mount them noatime. Or use a laptop disk, I really can't believe that the power usage of the disks is in any way going to be significant (and if it was then an SSD will be cheap) or just network boot the machine and write logs elsewhere.
... I'm trying to be a cheapskate as well! :-)
I don't have any SSDs or laptop disks lying around unused, I do have lots of memory in the system in question.
Network boot would be fine along with writing the logs somewhere else but what distribution lends itself easily to that sort of setup?
Many distro's have instructions on creating diskless network-boot clients (for example Ubuntu has a howto here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DisklessUbuntuHowto).
DRBL (http://drbl.org) might also help you with what you're looking for on a more distribution-agnostic manner.
I did have some systems set up like this a few years back so that I could have silent machines in bedrooms (they were old PCs with passively cooled CPUs and silent power supplies) - it does look like the documentation around this sort of setup hasn't changed much since then, so I don't know how up to date these methods are...
HTH,
Jim