[Opensim-users] So much fun in a so little box

[Jeff Kelley]

That was 6 months ago and I was in search of a 
host for a small grid. It should be low-cost, and 
I should have full access to the server and the 
database through ssh.

After a test on a dedicated server, I settled the 
price tag for a hosted machine should be around 
30¤/month. [Prices have changed since I have made 
my decision. I can now have a i3 8G for 
15¤/month, which is exactly the configuration I'm 
running]

But there was a special offer at my favorite 
hardware supplier I could not resist : A 128¤, 
low-size, low-power Core i3 "Next Unit 
Computing". This is a barebone. You have to add 
8Gb RAM (65¤) and a 60Gb SSD (54¤).

http://techreport.com/review/23888/review-intel-next-unit-of-computing

I do not recommend this model specifically. This 
is not a buying guide. There is a large choice of 
mini-PC at Shuttle, Gigabyte, Zotac, Acer... from 
Celeron to i7. Graphic power is a no-issue since 
the machine will run screenless.

Of course, if you sit it on a DSL like I do, 
bandwith is scarce. Get crappy hardware or get 
crappy network, so is the deal when budget is low.

The NUC arrives in a music box. Literally. It 
plays the Intel logo when you open it. So kitsch! 
My OS pick was CentOS 64. I chose the minimal 
install CD to spare my SSD. Some yum later, it 
was compiling gdi+ and MONO (maybe there is a 
gdi+ repo somewhere, anyway that's a short build. 
MONO is a hefty one).

wget the last opensim tarball, install and 
configure. Fast and smooth. The grid is running 
10 regions in 6 simulators (one simulator for the 
HG login region, one for the sandbox, five 
simulators with two regions each).

http://www.pescadoo.net/tmp/grid_monitoring_panel.png

Four avatars can log with no noticeable lag. 
There usually are two builders, a scripter, one 
friend or two chatting around. The machine 
consumes only 13W. These are actual, measured 
watts. Processor load less than 5% each core. 
Used RAM 6.3Gb. MySQL large-pages enabled. 
innodb_buffer_pool_size bumped to 256MMb. NEVER 
stick to the 8Mb default!

Everything is done through HG. All objects and 
object's content are set to group and shared with 
a SQL script so nobody gets stuck with uneditable 
objects. The team is advised to use HG1.0 
XInventoryService when possible, to get full 
acces to their inventories. Automatic OAR every 
10 hours and nightly SQL dump. NFS share to host 
the big files. Finally, there is voice since it 
speeds up things so much.

Why stop here?

I usually am reluctant to try oar's because they 
pollute the database. Remember, this is a 
low-cost project and I have only 60Gb of disk. 
Wouldn't that be nice if we had a trashable 
standalone just for that? Load anything you like, 
then DROP DATABASE when finished. Here we go. 
Duplicate the bin folder, configure, create a 
database and voila. The Mini-PC is now running a 
total of 19 regions.

All this in a 4" x 4" x 2" box.


-- Jeff