How to save 50kwh a month without much effort.
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We've a couple of servers in the basement that run all the time; our primary home server, which has all of our digital photos, recordings of tiny children chattering away, master copies of all of the free software projects I've ever worked on, tax forms, etc etc etc stored on it, and which serves as the primary domain controller for the NT domain at Chateau Chaos, and our backup server, which holds the nightly backup images from the primary server. A few months ago I bought a kill-a-watt electricity meter, and have been running around attaching it to various house things to see what's taking the most power out of the house, and discovered that the basement stack-of-computers was eating ~300 watts. Some of that was easy to deal with; I'd been leaving my Mastodon development machine on all the time, even though the only Mastodon development I've been doing was on pell, so I got back 130 watts by the simple expedient of turning the damned machine off. But that left the remaining two machines (a K7 and a P2/500) eating approximately 170 watts, which is TOO MUCH for a computing stack I intend to power from a solar array or a wind generator. So today I went to a motherboard swapping spree; OUT with the K7, IN with a VIA EPIA 5000, saving me ~50 watts. OUT with the P2/500, IN with another VIA EPIA 5000, saving me ~7 watts (older Pentia are nowhere near as energy hungry as K7s are.) And, finally, OUT went the Netgear gigabit fiber switch, IN went a dinky little linksys 5 port switch (I got back 20 watts by dumping the Netgear switch, but lost 4 of that to the linksys switch.)
The C3s are noticably slower when I compile things, so I will be well and thoroughly screwed if I need to do a 'make all' on the freebsd source stack on downbelow, but for shuffling files and domain information around, it probably wouldn't matter if I backed down to a 386, so the C3s are overkill enough for me.
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Wow.
You sure you aren’t a character in William Gibson’s next novel about server trains?
(no word yet about whether Bruce Sterling has signed on as a co-author).
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