I’ve been wanting to get myself a new server for a while now. I’ve been wanting to get some sort of mini-itx size, low power consuming computer. My cousin Paul had gotten a Via board, and I’ve been thinking of that. Since Apple released the Mac Mini, I’ve also been considering that. Both options look pretty good.
However, my mom stopped me from needing to get one of those. She bought me an eMac that she got some good deal on. It’s 700mhz g4 with 1gb of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. That’s more RAM than my old server had, and the hard drive will be way more than large enough for only storing server files. It’ll have plenty of room to store backup files as well. It seems plenty speedy. I imagine, though, that it uses a lot more power than the ibook. Definately when the CRT is running. I think it uses as much as 90 watts with that. It also has a fan constantly running (which will seem somewhat silly when my house gets down to 45ΓΒ°F this winter), a larger hard drive, and other such desktop power consuming items. And it doesn’t have the built in battery backup of the ibook, which could be an issue with the occasional power losses I get. Thus, I plan to eventually replace it with either a mini-itx type computer or some cheap laptop.
Still, it is rather nice to have. I now no longer have to worry a lick about taking my computer elsewhere or shutting it down or the like for fear of taking the server off the air. It will be very nice to be able to take it with me when visiting friends or what not, as it is a portable computer. It frees up plenty of memory and a little cpu time. And it just seems much nicer and more organized on both my server and my non-server. It gives me a little more training for setting up servers in more normal situation.
Because of this, I also have much reduced memory consumption on my ibook. Normally, my memory swells quickly and then pushes into swap files until I have four or five. They stay even with only the Finder open. Now though, I have free memory and fewer swap files, while the server is approaching it’s 1 GB limit with just the finder and Terminal running.