Choosing the hardware took a while but that was nothing compared to tracking down a Linux distribution to use! I’m a big fan of DSL and, being damn small, it runs a treat on the Netvoyager but it’s purpose in life isn’t really as a home server. So began a hunt for a Damn Small Home Server Linux distribution which has eventually led me to…
SLAMPPLite uses the XAMPP server suite, and is low fat version of the “instant home server” SLAMPP. Sounded promising! So far it’s lived up to expectations, running the XAMPP samples without any noticeable delays- here’s how it looked with everything running (though not necessarily doing anything!)…
top - 02:55:44 up 9 min, 1 user, load average: 0.49, 1.38, 0.94 Tasks: 80 total, 1 running, 79 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 2.6% us, 3.9% sy, 0.0% ni, 93.6% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 119544k total, 116608k used, 2936k free, 9428k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 55916k cached
So a pretty tight squeeze, but on a £95 box (they reduced it after I bought one!) I’m more than happy. As an added bonus, SLAMPP/SLAMPPLite are based on SLAX, which made recompiling the broker for publishing CurrentCost data a snap, plus you get some handy tools for customisation, including the MySlax Creator gui for those of us who spend too long with Windows, so I’ve been tinkering with an extra lite version! (I may well be installing SLAX on my venerable old ThinkPad 240 as well since it seems so flexible.)
Now that I have the LX1000 BIOS password, thanks to the very helpful Netvoyager customer support, I should be able to get it set up to boot back up after a power cut as well. Andy has also been asking about file serving but I haven’t given that a try yet. Plenty more to do!
Update: Another quick look at memory usage, this time after stopping a few unwanted services:
# free -t -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 116 100 16 0 17 62
-/+ buffers/cache: 19 97
Swap: 78 0 77
Total: 195 100 94
Notes from a small field 