Robert Holt's Weblog

Tuesday September 09, 2008

MSI-wind - as a low power Solaris home server

My continuing quest for a near silent / low power Solaris home server continue.

I ordered / had delivered an MSI wind barebones PC with atom processor.

I put a 1Gig RAM dimm in it, a spare 500G SATA drive I had lying around + a DVD drive ..

Total cost just over $200 so far.

It boots and runs the latest download of OpenSolaris (build 80 I think) and everything works apart from the

network which is a Realtek 8111C chip which there are no Solaris drivers for yet...

but ... 

there is a pci-e-mini slot on the motherboard and there are several wireless cards that are available

that do have Solaris drivers. Hence I ordered an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG 802.11b/g Wireless Network Adapter - add another $22.50 to the total.

The machine is very quiet - only one small fan on the back to vent the case. The power supply is a 19v DC 3.5Amp external 'black brick' type power supply which means I should hopefully be able to switch it out for something like a  couple of solar panels at some stage in the future. But that's a future project.

 Tomorrow I'm borrowing a 'kill-a-watt' device from a friend.  I'll report findings.