I
used to have a house full of PCs doing various things that really
didn’t need to be done. It’s a hobby, its fun. A few years ago I
decided to take a different path. Instead of spending time finding out
how many things I could get connected to my network, I tried to get rid
of as much as possible without losing any functionality. The results
have pleased the gf as well as reducing my power bill by $50+/month.
Start with the firewall.. I had a Dell server running linux and
iptables, freeswan, traffic shaping etc. It rarely even broke a sweat
as a firewall, although I really liked having a linux shell on my edge
router for testing purposes.. nothing beats tcpdump for figuring out
whats going on, and you can’t get that type of functionality from even
a fancy hardware firewall.
Or can you? Enter the linksys WRT54G. It’s a tiny little box with no
moving parts. It essentially has 5 nics which can be grouped into
switches. It has a 802.11g interface and allows easy connection of big
antennas. But most importantly, it runs linux. It runs linux, iptables,
tc etc very well, and all the diagnostic tools I wanted to have are
still available. This thing has easily paid for itself in power saved.
Next stop, the file server. We all need a box that runs 24/7 and stores
massive amounts of files (read pr0n). Once again, I was able to replace
a full server with a tiny box. This one is called the linksys NSLU2…
a tiny box with two usb ports and a nic. It runs linux, actually it
runs Debian which is incredible and kind of blows my mind. But anyways,
now all my files are served up by this little thing. It also runs
postfix and does some network monitoring for me. Another great feature
is that since the drives are all USB, I can turn off the ones that have
things I don’t need all the time on them. When I need something off
them, just turn the drive on and a few seconds later its available.
Third and final optimization was my combination of both a linux
and a windows desktop. Todays PCs are really fast, kind of ridiculously
fast if you arent playing the latest shoot em up. VMware is free now,
and I have found that as long as you have plenty of ram, running linux
on win or win on linux are both very usable. So two desktop machines
have become one with an extra GB ram. Even better, I can fire up an
extra windows box if I want to test something that I don’t trust on my
real machine (experimenting with WMF’s and such) or an extra linux box
to try out a new distro etc…
So I’ve gone from 4 PCs that ran 24/7 to one (and of course a laptop, and a hx4700 ppc, etc etc The small toys don’t count ;).
I originally thought that these little devices would be unreliable,
after all they are pretty cheap. But, both currently have uptimes over
100 days. I even kept the firewall/wireless ap running during a
hurricane here last year, they run forever on a ups that wouldn’t keep
a PC running 15 minutes. It’s suprising how quiet the office has
become. Over time you don’t notice the noise that several PCs can make,
but it’s significant. I can watch TV in there and hear it without
disturbing anyone late at night. The room used to be significantly
hotter than all the other rooms in my house, now it’s not noticable.
I’ve reclaimed a huge amount of space in my office. Sure, visitors
might not immediately realize that I am a total geek, but sometimes
that’s ok.
PS I don’t mean to be advertising Linksys stuff.. you can get
similar devices that run the same firmwares and linux distros from
other vendors. Check out http://www.openwrt.org/ [openwrt.org] and http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ [nslu2-linux.org] for more info.
