I know your pain. At home I have a good sized collection of hardware and the
noise level in my office was getting unbearably high. I used to have the mp3
player (xmms) turned up loud enough that I couldn't hear the doorbell ring.
I had been drooling over the G4 cube just because they're silent and MacOS X
really is nice.
Some additional ideas to think about. If you've got another Unix server on
the LAN, you could netboot the gateway. Rather than having a local file
system (and consequently hard drive), use a Intel EtherExpress+ and PXE
netboot it. It works surprisingly well. I have a stack of old PPro 200's
with 128MB of RAM each, one Intel NIC card, and they all netboot off one
FreeBSD server. I have them fetch a 25MB root file system which gets mounted
as a MFS. You just need to have enough RAM in the machine to accomodate
their root file system and nfs mount the /usr and anything else you want.
If not, yet another option might be enabling the power management in BIOS so
that the drive spins down when not in use. If the machine is just a gateway,
it's file system probably isn't all that busy. Some machines also support
having their fan speeds slow when in a power savings mode.
Alas that wasn't enough for me so I worked around the problem in the
following manner.
First I replaced the drives in my G3 and FreeBSD X server with IBM GXP75
series UDMA drives. I had tested a few at work and was impressed. Not only
are they wicked fast but they're cheap (>$150 for 30GB), oh-so-quiet, and
run very cool. Cool enough in fact that the internal temperature in my G3
case dropped enough that I was able to remove the CPU cooling fan I
installed back when I overclocked it. That was two significant noise
reductions. The G3 is very quiet now with only the power supply fan making a
little noise. It's quiet enough that it sits on my desk without annoying me.
My Dell PII450 on the other hand, that runs FreeBSD is not very silent.
Despite the much quieter drive, the cooling fans are still fairly noisy.
Rather than disabling one of the fans (without a good way to measure it's
effect) I chose to instead get a longer set of KVM and sound cables and
shove it into the not-so-far-away closet where it's whirring isn't offending
my ears. I can then access the server via the KVM switch and run X programs
via a SSH connection from the HP 9000 which is also be left out without
offending my ears.
The last step in silencing the office was running cat 5 to the garage,
buying a 19" rack and rackmounting the pile of FreeBSD servers and
networking hardware I had sitting in the office. I only turned on machines
as I needed them in the office but since they're 2U rackmount servers, the
fans are in the front and they're noisy. The garage has additional power
drops and since it's only partially heated, it's always cooler and therefore
a better location for the machines.
Good luck to you and and may your silence be golden.
Matt
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Renaud Waldura [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2000 11:00 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Silent FreeBSD
>
>
> I've got that FreeBSD gateway in a corner at my house, it
> works fine & dandy
> but the constant noise (whirring fans, hard drives) gets on my nerves.
>
> What solutions have people explored to quiet down a computer
> system? (actual
> experience will be preferred over wild speculations). I'm
> already aware of
> PicoBSD, but I need more storage than just a floppy. Has anybody
> experimented with RAM cards? How about noise-proof enclosures?
>
> --Renaud
>
>
>
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