On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 10:14:37AM +0100, Chris Walker wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Does anyone here have any experience of the Fit PC 2 ? They are getting almost reasonably priced now - CPC have the Linux one for £285 (plus VAT) which for a really tiny and low powered machine isn't at all bad.
Power consumption is 5 watts, it has 1Gb of memory and a 160Gb hard disk and Gigabit ethernet. It would thus seem to be quite a good basis for various Linux based "boxes on the network". It comes with Ubuntu 8.04 installed.
Can I be nosey and ask what your intended use for this will be please?
I like the idea of a low power box and had thought about one as doing various things like fetching/storing mail and providing some sort of backup medium although I'm far from sure how this might work, hence the question.
It's more for a router/DNS/etc. that I was thinking of using it for, maybe for mail too. With a 160Gb hard disk it has loads of space for a Linux installation and some storage for mail etc. but it's not really got the capacity to use as a backup store (well, not for us anyway, our current backup system has 1Tb and is 75% full). Adding a disk would rather spoil its compactness (and probably its low power consumption).
What I'd really like is a "Fit 2 PC" in a much bigger box so one could add one or two big disks but no one seems to produce such a beast. I *guess* a Fit 2 PC with an external SATA box would be not too bad a solution.
My current dekstop system is "always on" as it provides DNS (using dnsmasq) for the local network and it has some web pages visible to the outside world, it also is the mail server for my mail. It's not a power hungry system (uses about 70w on idle) but most of what it does could be provided by a Fit 2 PC. As well as saving power one could put a more conservative, possibly server only, Linux distribution on it with "state of the art" software on the desktop machine. At the moment I have to steer a sort of middle course.
One could also then consider router functions (firewall, load balancing, etc.) being moved to the Fit 2 though I'm not totally sure that's a good idea as it would mean a single point of failure that would break a whole lot of things.