ARM server

johnlu · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 12:26 am Post subject: ARM server

Hi,

I'm using an old Pentium III 700MHz, 1GiB SDRAM 133MHz as a server. I'd like to know your opinions about getting an ARM based media server or something like that, raspberry pi, cubox, genesi, beagle box.

My idea is to attach a harddisk to this and connect to my LAN and use this as my personal web server and NAS.
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John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 3:26 am Post subject:

Moved from Kernel & Hardware to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures.

- John
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yngwin · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 6:16 am Post subject:

I am looking at the Mele A1000 for something like that. You can plugin a SATA disk.
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johnlu · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 10:35 am Post subject:

Gentoo is installable in a Mele A1000/A2000?? This is a good option, I'll think on this, but I'd like to find something with 1GB RAM.

Do you know Cubox?
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yngwin · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 12:11 pm Post subject:

johnlu · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 2:08 pm Post subject:

I think that Mele A1000/A2000 doesn't use an standard linux kernel, so it'll very dificult to support all its hardware under Gentoo.
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chithanh · Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2012 1:03 am Post subject:

Embedded devices which work with standard upstream kernels are the exception rather than the rule unfortunately. The various *plugs (Dreamplug, Sheevaplug, etc.) are supported, as are most of the devices which OpenWrt runs on.

If performance is secondary to power consumption, you could just replace your current router with an OpenWrt capable device with USB port (I have a TP-Link WR1043ND which works fine for the purpose).

johnlu · Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2012 10:05 am Post subject:

Thanks chithanh.

Performance is important, at least I'm looking for something similar to my Pentium III, but I'd like to reduce its electrical comsuption. So, my idea was to look the market looking for the best option.

Mele looks at first sight the best option, I don't know if its lack of an standard kernel will be a problem to update Gentoo when 2 or 3 years have passed from now.
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jormartr · Apprentice Joined: 02 Jan 2008 Posts: 174

Maybe not what you are looking for, but what about a used cheap netbook?

Tuned and with LCD off should not have a high power comsumption. It will have a convenient integrated ups and console as a plus, and maybe you can find something cheap, altough not as cheap as some ARMs.

johnlu · Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2012 1:21 pm Post subject:

I own a WM8650 7" netbook, it has a linux kernel with lots of blobs (close sourced) so, and its original linux kernel is not compatible with our Gentoo.

The thing is that almost all arm manufacturers make linux close source drivers. So this makes things very difficult for people to use their own distributions on those machines.

There are some news about some manufacturers (Dell and HP) making new ARM based servers, but those all are oriented to high end bussiness. There are no solutions for ARM low power consumption for little purposes like home server or little companies.

I think that it will be great to have something like raspberry pi or mele a2000 without HD hardware h264 decoder and no GPU, just more RAM, a good CPU, ethernet (gigabit), SATA and USB. But I think that there is nothing like this on the market right now.
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jormartr · Apprentice Joined: 02 Jan 2008 Posts: 174

I was talking about an used x86 or amd64 netbook, not as cheap, but close, and deals with almost all of your requeriments.

johnlu · Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 9:39 am Post subject:

Neither a netbook nor notebook are not prepared to stay running 24/7. It'll break after a year or few months.
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armin76 · Retired Dev Joined: 24 Apr 2006 Posts: 174

johnlu · Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 2:06 am Post subject:

thanks for your suggestion!
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techcode · n00b Joined: 09 Sep 2006 Posts: 42

I got Iomega iConnect for ~€30 new on sale and WD 2 Tb USB 2.0/3.0 and ARM Gentoo works fine in that combo. Only problem was that network should be 1Gb as no twigling with arch number really helped, and 100Mb doesn't work when machine thinks it's on 1Gb. As a result the front led is also flashing constantly - and I didn't bothered with WiFi.

Otherwise it's basically SheevaPlug with 256Mb of ram - and I've got SSHFS, Samba, Aria2 ... compiled on it and running.

uBoot is also picky so first partition should be one containing kernel.