[H-GEN] spinning down (longish)

Sarah Hollings sarahhollings at optushome.com.au
Thu Jan 23 22:53:49 EST 2003


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Hi all,

Having upgraded boxen at home once or twice over the last few years, we 
have a few boxes which are looking for work.

Ideas have been -
** an internal only ftp server / file store
** web proxy, junkbuster, etc
** samba domain controller
** IMAP mail store
** MP3's....

Our trusty P133 gateway machine which was doing NAT/firewall for our 
Cable died in the heat and is now replaced by a netcomm box 1/20th the 
size/power-consumption/hassle.

So that old gateway box (a P133 with a 2.1GB and a 6.2GB drive) is free. 
  I've fitted an new PSU, but the Rhino8 bios won't handle todays HDD's 
and the drives are somewhat suspect after the heat-death.

But also free-ish is a P667 (10GB+20GB), and a P733 (20GB).

(( Yes, Raymond and I have more computers than is probably healthy. 
Ray: you still have 3 or 4 fixed-freq 21" monitors I've been nagging you 
to get rid of! ))

Both of the bigger machines get used for LAN gaming occasionally (along 
with the Athlon boxen we have for desktops) so will get booted into 
Windows at odd times.

 >>>> Getting to the point (I'm in holiday mode right now :-)...

My current plan is to set up the P667 as a the server.  I've put an 
extra fan into it, but cooling still concerns me.  Our place isn't 
air-conditioned (spent all our $$ on 'puters  ;-)

We bought a new drive (40GB is what you get when you go HDD shopping 
these days).

I've got the 40GB, the 20GB and the 10GB HDD's in the P667, and that's 
great, lots of room for our FTP server, MP3's or whatever.

But when we're not using our computers (0000hrs-1900hrs weekdays) those 
3 drives are spinning and generating heat.  Heat kills 'puters.

I'd like to use hdparm to set them to go to sleep.

But this guy:

   http://dissemble.net/tlug-archive/01-06/11910.html

...thinks that's a bad idea.

Opinions, wild conjecture and offers for computer junk gratefully 
received...  ;-)


Sarah Hollings


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