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So why is there a server in our house? Because it’s fun.

Few months ago (before I saw this, honestly!) dad and I agreed that having a family file server was a good idea. What conviced us what the mess we were having with family photos – some of them were on my father’s computer, some on mine. We also wanted to get rid of duplicate data (apps, few isos, etc.) between our computers.  What was surprising to me, my mom was also enthusiastic about the idea. Before we stared, we decided that our server has to:

• be quiet (preferably fanless),
• be economic / ecologic (small power consumption),
• have a lot of space (in RAID-1 setup, if possible),
• cost no more than 1000 PLN (ca 300 €),

After doing some research, I decided to buy one of VIA’s EPIA motherboards – which are small (mini-itx), fanless (!), and consume relatively low power (ca. 15 W) comparing to their full-size competitors. From my rough calculations whole system would consume no more that 30-40W of energy, beside the already mentioned motherboard (with integrated CPU, NIC and VGA), there would be a 1TB SATA disk. With 40W of power conspution, estimated cost of running it 24/7 was:

24 (hours) * 30 (days) * 0.04 kW (power consumption) * 0.3 PLN (estimated price of 1kWh of energy) ~= 10 PLN

As low as 10 PLN (about 3 €) a month. Boy I wish I could pay that „much” on a gas station …

It took about three weeks before I bought all the required parts:

• EPIA SP-8000EG FANLESS motherboard,
• a D-153 chasis (designed for VIA’s EPIA motherboards),
• 1TB Samsung HD103UJ SATA HDD,
• 1GB DDR RAM,

Total cost: 1003 PLN (incl. VAT), which is about 300 €. Once assembled it looks like this:

Maybe it’s not beautiful, but it doesn’t have to be.
Now to the more technical part, it is powered by PLD Th:

[root@epiath ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : CentaurHauls
cpu family : 6
model : 9
model name : VIA Nehemiah
stepping : 8
cpu MHz : 800.047
cache size : 64 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr cx8 sep mtrr pge cmov pat mmx fxsr sse up rng rng_en ace ace_en
bogomips : 1602.68
clflush size : 32[root@epiath ~]#

And it was so quiet…  image a system where the most nosiest component is its hdd (about 27dB). Unfortunately, it failed as a fanless system, the hdd warmed up to more than 45°C. We decided to insert small, 8x8cm fan inside the chasis. It helped a lot – the hdd temperature dropped almost isntantly to less than 35°C, and as I am writing thist post, hddtemp reports 28°C. At the price of lower temperature, we got a bit louder system and a slightly higher power consumption.

Epiath (I probably suck at naming my systems) is a new project – it went „live” about three weeks ago, and is still not finished, there are few thins I still plan to do:

• remote access (OpenVPN), so that my brother could share his photos as well,
• track new files (with find), and announce them with mail sent on a daily basis,
• develop a search engine – search throuch file names at a minimum, perhaps we could make use of beagle to scan through contents as well (any experience with that anyone?),
• NFS access – or is it more convenient to use SMB, even for a Linux user?

So far, I am quite happy we decided to build our home server – even though it did cost a bit (you don’t spend 300 € everyday, do you?).