Blog Action Day: Ways to save energy and still have all your geek toys.

One of the things that may have the biggest impact on you using less electricity and helping the environment and giving you more cash to spend at Jinx or Think Geek is consolidation. Think of this you have 3 or for low spec boxes running Linux using them for various tasks suck as a web server, a photo server, a media server and maybe even a mail server. That is a lot of hardware and a lot of power that you are using 27x7x365 and hopefully with five nines of up time as you never know when friends will want that ripped copy of bevis and buthead at 3am.

What I have done is consolidate all of this hardware into one box, if you work in IT you may just brush this off as another buzz word but it is really worth while. At home I have consolidated via Xen a Linux Hypervisor all of my servers onto on box. They and not just running everything on the one singe instance of the OS, but each function still has it s own instance of OS.

Another cool thing about using Xen is that you can run in a paravirt state where the virtual machines kernel is aware of being virtual and this offers a substantial improvement in performance in comparison of things running as fully virtual.

Running all of my servers on one large piece of hardware is seeing my household have a 10% saving on the amount of electricity that we use and that could be potentially more depending on how mch hardware you are running at home.

Another device that I am looking at lowering the power consumption on is my firewall, I am looking at a few options one that I know will work is moving away from my linux server running iptables to a Cisco 1710 or other Ethernet router with a Firewall firmware. Though what I am really excited about is some of the Embedded Linux Hacking that is going on with the Linksys WRT range and a few other devices and running my Firewall on that. This would be great as a WRT only draws 7 Watts, though I am still looking at how possible this is. I will post more about it in the near future.

I also came across relevant episode of one of my favorite IPTV shows SYSTM put out by the guys at revision3, that is all about saving energy with all of your geek toys. I have embedded it bellow but you can also download it here.



The device that they are using to measure the voltage is called a kill-a-what and is available online via Think Geek.