Peter's Blog 2.6.2004

IBM Woes

The IBM DeskStar hard disk I put in my Sky Plus box on Saturday has died (re: Sky Plus Repairs). It has gone into infinite recalibrate mode. I think this confirms the poor reputation of DeskStar hard disks and it does not surprise me that IBM got out of the hard disk market.

In my recollection I have bought three IBM products in my life:

• DeskStar hard disk

• A reconditioned ThinkPad (the butterfly keyboard kind) that spontaneously switches itself off (even when powered from the mains)

• A copy of OS/2. I found it slow and buggy and I went back to windows 3.1.

I'm sure this is just bad luck and many customers are happy with their fine products. I just hope they don't mess too much with linux.

IMAP mail

I've rearranged my work email again. I've gone for the following:

• Fetchmail to get email from pop accounts

• Exim still as MTA

• Courier IMAP

• Mozilla Thunderbird

This has some advantages over the previous setup:

• IMAP means my mail is stored on the linux box in simple Maildir format: each message is in a seperate file. No nasty proprietary databases to corrupt, I can use a nice fast search engine.

• I can change email clients very easily without having to migrate the email: Outlook, Outlook express and Thunderbird all work.

• It fits in with my plan to hyperlink project blog/wiki with email. I just knock up something to convert the email to html on the fly.

• I installed sqwebmail to give me remote access anywhere in the company (that side of the firewall). I don't think I can use that to serve up web pages to other people without opening up my email account. Sqwebmail works but it's not very pretty.

• Thunderbird has a built in spam filter so I don't need Spambayes. This is a nice simplification. Spambayes worked but it was very slow handling email with attachments.

PC Power Consumption

Currently I use an old laptop as a server. It is a Pentium 1, 166MHz, 80M ram with a 2G hard disk and a PCMCIA network adapter. I use it because:

• it is fairly quiet, some fan noise

• I assumed it would use less power than a desktop pc

I have a spare 333MHz Pentium II desktop system that I could also use. Thinking about power consumption, I decided to do some research. This article implies that there is not that much difference between a laptop and a desktop, given that the monitor is off (especially a laptop from that era: this Centrino laptop I am writing this on may be better). The article and this calculator tell me that it would cost about £60 a year to run a server 24/7 which seems expensive. I like having a server and if I'm going to have one I may as well have a powerful one.

Other random thoughts:

• Each hard disk consumes about 25W: only need 1

• Dedicated server pc should be stripped of audio, multiple video cards, USB peripherals and anything else that just burns watts.

• Signing up for online hosting isn't much more expensive. Don't get root login power and kudos though.

• Desktop systems are noisy. The server is an old AT motherboard, are quiet PSU's available for these? Hack quiet fans into the old case?