I’m proud to announce I brought up a new server. As always, this is a remote, geeky, for the hell of it type of server. It is self sufficient, requiring no external help “per se”. The server is powered by a bank of golf cart batteries, 6 of them to be exact, in series and parallel, giving me 12 volts. From there, we have a 480 Watt inverter. Quick tests/math guesses give me 25-32 hours of power without any external sources. To recharge the batteries, I have a 500 Watt turbine connected directly to the batteries. The turbine has a built-in overcharge unit to keep from killing the batteries. The server runs idly at around 58 Watts and 190 Watts at full load. I had to use an external video card because the onboard card added an extra 12 Watts (vs 2 Watts for an older ATI card). The CPU was declocked 12% and that saved another 2-14 Watts (depending on load). For internet access, I am currently using an RJ45 cable running over the side of an apartment building to a cable modem running with a 20 meg connection and no blocked ports! I am building 2 cantenna’s as we speak, so it will be upgraded to a 108MB wireless connection tomorrow or the day after. So, it will be an almost 100% self reliant server! The cost of the turbine was totally not worth the electricity savings; but the geek factor makes it all so special!
What do I plan to do with this server? I have no idea. I put in 1TB of storage on a RAID 10, 4×500GB drives, SATA2. There is about 2GB of ram and it is running Windows 2003 Server as its host and VMWare server running another Windows 2003 Server and Debian J I will most likely use it as a form of storage and offload my web traffic on it when my other servers are overloaded.
Nothing like hosting your own backup solution, just need to upgrade my encryption algorithm: 3DES (encrypt/decrypt/encrypt, 1 KEY).