Nuno Magalhces wrote: ... > My test box is an old Compaq Armada laptop - no battery, no monitor, a > piece of junk. But works, with 96RAM running Open BSD. I use it to > serve http and ssh at the moment, and maybe ftp in the future. Being a > laptop it uses less power and the fan is more silent. I'm inclined to > having it working 24/7, however, it only has a 4GB disc. > > What i'm thinking about is finding a big 2.5" IDE and use that laptop > not only as my server toy but also as my /home, that way i can share > its contents through the home network to the other pcs. The desktop > would mount it at startup (NFS?), they're connected through the home > router. Alternatively i could find a way to adapt the 3.5" 160GB SATA > to the laptop but i think that's unlikely. The laptop only has USB > 1.0. > > Are there any big hard drive limitations or is creating a small /boot > partition at the start of the disk enough? > Any other suggestions?
this isn't Linux, we aren't using a /boot partition. You need a small root partition. You can get a 250G HD for sickeningly cheap. It will probably just take off and run...though some Compaqs have historically had serious problems with BIOSs and "large" disks, so don't be surprised if you put a 250G disk in the thing and it refuses to POST. A BIOS upgrade may help...or it may help only up to 128G (or 32G, or ...) You will be in for a rude surprise should you need to fsck a drive that big with that "small" amount of RAM. See appropriate entries in FAQs 14 and 4. Give yourself a lot of swap and tweak the default file system parameters a bit, though, and you might be happy...assuming your FS needs match your tweaking, and not the much more general purpose defaults. You will wish you had a functioning battery the first time you knock out the power cord. How do you plan to back this thing up? (don't bother answering to me or the list, we don't care. You might someday...so you should have an answer in mind). Be forewarned, laptops aren't generally designed for 24x7 operation. Neither the disks nor the machines are designed for that. 'course, my backup IBM A21p (love that screen!) just died, leaving just my "production" one (my favorite laptop, which has one of those cheap 250G disks, but 384M RAM and no one huge partition), so I'm even more cynical about that than usual... You may want to check your assumptions about power consumption and laptops, and actually measure comparable machines. I was a little surprised when I put a Wattmeter on my Thecus and a Celeron 500, and found out that the price I paid for the new Thecus will NEVER compensate for the small reduction in power consumption over the free Celeron 500 (something like 18W vs. 22W) (do proper comparisons, booted to the target OS, with the OS doing what it will be doing in production (which for most home users is nothing, though in the case above, under full load, the Celeron 500 went to something like 40W, the Thecus went to around 24W). Nick.
