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Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Turn an Old PC into a Server with NASLite+
By Alice Hill
My Next Project Dept: I love old hardware, but mostly it's like the way a scavenger loves old cars. I see a useable case, a perfectly fine keyboard, working mouse and can easily patch together parts to make a quickie spare rig or something to pass down through the less cutting-edge members of family. But here's a software product called NASLite+ that for about $25 will turn your old system into a kicking server for up to 50 users.

The details: "NASLite+ is well suited for re-using older PCs that are still operational but are too limited or slow for use as desktop computers. In addition, NASLite+ enables older computers with BIOS limitations to use contemporary, large-capacity IDE fixed disk drives without the need for additional hardware.

"As a network file server, NASLite+ may very well offer the highest possible storage capacity for the money. NASLite+ servers of 1 Terabyte or more of storage space can be built for about 500 dollars US. For example, with NASLite+ you can take a retired Pentium 200MHz computer, install a couple of 250GB fixed disk drives and have a fast, reliable 500GB NASLite+ file server for a few dollars above the cost of the fixed disk drives."

As I said, this my next project when I get home from my current business trip. I have a Dell I just outgrew that will make a perfect file server. Stay tuned for how it all goes. In the meantime, if you want to give it a try, click here to check out more on this interesting product.

And calling all server guys....spare me needless pain by telling me why this is a lame idea.

# Permalink Posted at 6:14 AM 5 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

It's not necessarily a lame idea, but it's not as exciting as it might seem. NASlite is just a distribution of Linux, so there's nothing remarkable going on there except a more user-friendly administrative interface (and they're not the first to offer such a thing).

There's two things to keep in mind in terms of hardware, though: first, a machine with a 200MHz CPU is going to have a similarly-antique disk subsystem. If the CPU is 1997-vintage, the disk controller will be 1997-vintage as well, which I certainly wouldn't describe as fast. That box won't have the memory capacity and speed to do effective caching, either, so there's another bottleneck compared to modern hardware, and it will probably only have a 10MB network card which is pretty much unsuitable these days for anything beyond a home network (and even that's pushing it).

Second, if you're using it as a file server, you need it to be reliable -- if everyone needs their shares available then that single PC failing might as well mean all of the office PCs failed in terms of people unable to get work done. A 1997-vintage machine is going to be a lot more fragile than a modern one. At that point you might as well spend another hundred bucks and get an entry-level box that's only a couple years old, at which point you could still run NASlite or even Win2k.

Same principle applies to disks: if you want reliability, you need redundancy, so a pair of 250MB disks would get you 250MB of mirrored storage, or four 250MB disks would get you 750MB of redundant storage, and so forth.

A Linux box in the corner makes a great NAS system, but the performance limitations of a fileserver are in hardware, so you'll get as fast a system as the box it's run on.

# posted by rich 11:05 AM

What if you use Naslite+ with older server hardware, such as Proliant 1500? They seem to have decent disk and network IO, and great reliability?But will it feed file requests to multiple users fast enough?

# posted by greif 8:49 PM

NASLite will run headless without a keyboard or monitor, plus you can use a low-powered PC without a fan if you prefer. I have an old p133 that's been sitting under my desk for 8 months now. I can hear the drives, but not much more than that. It is true that the "performance limitations of a fileserver are in hardware", but in this case it's specifically the network hardware that's the bottleneck.

Anyway, as a home user, I can safely say that NASLite is the best way to get a couple of 250G drives on my LAN without a large investment of time and money.

# posted by Pioneer 6:11 AM

I don't get it. I've got a P2-266 running XP that does the same thing. I added an EIDE card that I got free with a big HD, added a handful of extra drives and I've got a .5+ TB server. It runs cool with no keyboard, mouse or monitor and has been up for months. If I need to admin it I log in with VNC. I wouldn't run a large office off it but with a GB NIC it's fast enough for most. Total cost without the drives was $20 for the NIC. The rest came out of the junk pile.

# posted by Anonymous 1:15 AM

Interesting for sure. After Googling for "naslite" i ran into this website http://www.terabyteserver.de.ms/ where some guy in germany built a naslite server.

So what can i say, they got my $25

# posted by Anonymous 8:38 PM

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