Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Nvidia has h.264 hardware acceleration on them so it should do pretty well.

Sure, but you'll probably want to add a Broadcom Crystal HD mini-PCIe card for h.264/Blu-ray acceleration.

Seconded, and I wouldn't recommend it if you use Netflix and YouTube (especially Netflix, since you can play YouTube through third-party H.264 players now) heavily as Flash and Silverlight both have poor (albeit improving) hardware video acceleration support and the Atom is really not up to decoding high quality video.

Oh, and you'd also want to grab a cheap ($14 on eBay) USB audio interface for Dolby/DTS via optical output.

Yeah, just wanted it as a cheap media pc, that ion board does seem to be a little costly, so more saving is in order. There are also some ion boards that don't come with a cpu, so I had a gander for some atom cpus, quick look in amazon was unsuccessful.

I'll have a look for some audio stuff .

What psu do you have running?

It's a Coolmax CM-300, though I replaced the stock internal fan with a NMB/Panaflo 3106KL-04W-B50-C00 (80mm x 15mm).

Quite efficient then .

After a little more saving the system should be ready to be built up .

I finally cut over to my D510MO last night. So far so good, the noise reduction alone was worth it I won't see the kind of power savings Neko got but still it's about 60watts less then old server. I did have run a parallel port and serial port out the back of my little case and I added an Intel e1000 pci card into the free slot that runs to the DSL bridge. My server is also the router, print server, samba server, nfs server, you name it. The only trick part was cutting over from UW-IMAP to Dovecot we have mailboxes dating back to 2000 so I had walk carefully but other then a few users needed to replace IMAP Prefix Path things went well.

Only thing I need to do is unplug the Blue LED on the Antec ISK case, it's way too bright at night.

Thanks for the inspiration Neko! I think this is going to work very nicely.

-Mike

Glad to hear it's up and running! In regards to Dovecot, etc. -- I faced much the same. I wound up going with many of the same packages I'd used on IRIX to make it easier to retain configuration settings and databases - Cyrus IMAP, ncftpd, ircd-hybrid, ipfilter, Postfix etc. Still took a while to get everything set up and configured, but not nearly as long as working from a clean slate

The event with the outage last week probably makes it sound like the D510MO is to blame, but it was really just a hard drive that quit while still well under factory warranty. The drive has already been shipped off for a free RMA. Aside from that drive (which failed quite loudly - clack! clack! clack!) I haven't had a single crash, freeze or unexplainable event occur since starting the FreeBSD server last January. I'm quite happy with the setup so far.

Drives are always the weakest link as we all know. Sounds like a good choice getting a RAID controller for it. With only 2 SATA headers it's all a matter of choices with these little beasts. I went with extra ethernet interface because it's the head of my network. However I did go software raid on 2x320gb 2.5in seagate drives [5 year warranties of course]. Hopefully the drives will last the 4 or 5 year life cycle of this thing.

-Mike

PS - Did you notice there are BIOS updates? The latest is 4/10/2010 I've been following the BIOS releases because there does seem to be a BIOS bug with regards the the Winbond w83627thf sometimes has the wrong CPU read out and the fan control reads zero even though it's running full speed. Not the end of the world but was hoping Intel would fix it.

Cool, I just updated my BIOS to that rev, thanks for the tip!

Did you wind up going with a USB based optical drive? If so, how is that working out?

I really only need the usb CDROM to boot the install , so it worked out fine. So for now it has no optical at all, but with samba and nfs the files are just a few clicks away something that does.

[My last server didn't either but that was not from lack open ports. I'm reminded that a few years ago I got a call from a client telling me the mail server didn't come back up after they had a power outage, so I had to drive down and check it out. Turns out someone had stuck a Windows XP disc in the cdrom at some piont and when the thing rebooted. So I handed him the offending CD and disabled usb and cdrom booting the BIOS. No more trusting someone not to do silly things.]

-Mike

Okay, I've done the same. This afternoon I built a RAID1 across the two internal SATA channels on fresh drives. I also tested the DVD-ROM with a USB to SATA converter and it seems fine, so if I need optical in the future I have that to fall back on.
Thanks much!

Hey your drives are bigger then mine, I've got drive envy! ;P

-Mike

beep-beep beep-beep, his horn went beep beep beep !