Posted by robcarr on March 7, 2011 at 9:23pm
I'm just putting a Drupal site together to support community infrastructure in Haiti. Due to the current unreliability of the net in Haiti, the agency have requested a self-contained system (ie, an intranet), so I was going to provide the site on a pre-configured LAMP box to sit in the corner of their office and deliver Drupal goodness over a LAN.
Does anyone have any real experience of using a basic nettop or netbook to act as a robust Drupal server? Systems such as the EeePC or EeeBox PC only have an Atom processor and 1GB of RAM and wonder if it's enough to for a handful of simultaneous users (and no anon users :-)).
Any other thoughts??
Comments
Portable Hardware Suggestion
I've set up a couple of systems like that for testing. 1Ghz processor and 2gig memory. Running Linux (CentOS) you get good performance at low load levels. I don't have experience on how it scales, but if you are getting traffic to justify upgrading to a faster CPU and cooling can be justified.
Good luck! Sounds like an interesting project,
See you tonight at the Pasadena meetup?
Matt
RE: portable hardware
Couple of quick thoughts: if it's going to sit in their office perhaps a desktop PC would be a better choice? It will have more processing power, probably won't cost that much more than a netbook, would be more expandable, and you'd have the option of adding another drive in a RAID-1 configuration (here I'm thinking "beige box" PC with an onboard RAID controller; I'd imagine enterprise-grade server hardware is out of the question for cost reasons?) And of course if the RAID controller isn't available or is too expensive you could just add a second drive and set up a nightly script to copy all the data to the second drive in case the first one fails.
I've often read/heard that humanitarian tech initiatives have challenges when it comes to support; i.e. it works great when it gets there but when it breaks a year down the road there are few repair/recovery options. That would be my primary concern with a netbook, besides the obvious "is it powerful enough" question. Along those same lines, sending a desktop UPS that will provide some power conditioning and protection from the inevitable power spikes might go a long way towards ensuring the hardware stays operational.
Good luck with the project!
Robust Hardware and Tropic Humidity = "Tin" Macintosh
Run the thing on any Mac laptop that has a metal case. PowerBooks (G3 and G4) are cheap enough on eBay, especially small display models.
Friends of mine on archeological digs in Costa Rica found Mac laptops stayed up despite extremes of tropical humidity and temperature (many other boxes didn't).
Mac hardware is robust. PowerBooks I used in the field absorbed multiple beatings (any one of which would have finished a plastic-cased machine) including a 3.5 mm dent in the case, being dropped from almost a meter I don't know how many times, dirty power, etc. I replaced one hard drive in all that time.
All the best.
Give love.
D7
Drupal 7 can make use of additional database options, such as sqlite. You could roll out a SheevaPlug (plug computer) with a USB flash drive attached. It's super low power as well. We have many of them rolled out in a production application, and the only issue to date has been the reliability of the power supply. They are $10 so just order a spare and you are good to go.
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit-us.aspx
Of course, if you have room and power availability then I'd go with a full PC with a small UPS.
All great advice and thank
All great advice and thank you for your comments. I agree a full PC would be most cost efficient, but the team is flying out in a few weeks and they need to carry the hardware with them - hence desire for small form factor - and they won't have expertise to install DAMP themselves on a locally sourced machine, so I'm trying to pre-empt as many problems beforehand.
I'm still trying to nudge the agency to use a hosted server (the most robust and manageable solution), but they have had serious net outages over the past 15 months that at times it's just not practical. So we are looking at Backup/Migrate via Dropbox (or something similar) so that we could rebuild a new system and courier it out to them if things go badly wrong.
I liked the idea that Development Seed had for putting specific Drupal distros/sites on a stick, but if you read their posts there have been a lot of hardware/OS problems. The SheevaPlug is new to me and looks really interesting; at the moment the site is D6, so it's MySQL only... but is the SheevaPlug capable of running a full Apache/NginX, MySQL + PHP site if you give it extra [external] memory?
Sheeva
Sheeva COULD run a full stack with D6, but IMO the biggest limitation is memory. At 512MB of RAM I wouldn't personally advise MySQL in that environment. You can add as much disk storage as you like via USB but you are limited to the 512MB of memory. I guess you could always do a ramdisk but I haven't tried that. It probably wouldn't be terrible if you use fast flash storage.
SheevaPlugs come pre-installed with what is usually a very current release of Debian with a current kernel. So you can pop it out of the box and go pretty quickly. There are also somewhat newer models with slightly faster CPU and more external ports (GuruPlug). We have some of those as well. There are more reports of those devices overheating, so if I had to suggest something I'd go with the original SheevaPlug ($100) and a spare power supply ($10).
Again in your situation I'd still probably head to Newegg and roll-your-own MicroATX board with the smallest case possible. It won't cost much more (maybe $200-$250) and you will get a lot better performance.
A couple other options
Have you looked into the Engineers Without Borders project? Based on what they do, they're constantly having to think outside the box to bring cool engineering marvels to more isolated corners of the world. Poking around might provide even more, focused tips & tricks than what folks have been so kind to share here. http://www.ewb-usa.org/
Also, along Michael's suggestion for Mac hardware what about using a Mac mini? A good buddy of mine lives on a boat & uses his Mac mini to manage his computing and entertainment environments. I'm not a Mac guy so not sure about the various memory options which, based on the amount of Drupal read/writes to the database, might be your bottleneck.
On a side note: Rob, you're in Scotland now? Man, no wonder I haven't seen your cheerful face around the LA Drupal meetups. Hope you're having fun, bud.
Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu
Thanks Miguel. I've read a
Thanks Miguel. I've read a lot about EWB's work, and a lot of what they do is pretty humbling, but that's a great suggestion and will scour their site for more inspiration. The Mac Mini was my initial choice - as they are pretty robust and easy to set up. But the project I'm working on is very much a charity with slim resources, hence looking for something a little more basic (and open sourced). However, if I get pushed for time, walking in to my local Apple store is an attractive and soft option.
After LA, life in Scotland is at an entirely different pace. Already had one DrupalCamp in Edinburgh which was good fun. But the snow this winter, however, has certainly lost its novelty.
Used "Tin" Macs
Then you'll get the best value from a used Mac Powerbook or other "tin" G3/G4 laptop. An old 12" G4 with 1+ GB RAM is approx $300 on eBay. G3 are even less (many under $100), but you don't get the "tin" case.
Note also that in the MacOS environment, install/config/maintainance of Drupal is a lot easier than in Windows.
Just keep 3 - 4 mm of space underneath these G3/G4 boxes for cooling and they will last forever.
Give love.