On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Tim Wescott <[email protected]> wrote: > He's of the opinion that a laptop is gonna break if it's left on all the > time. I'm of the opinion that it's going to be pretty less heavily > loaded than if someone were using it (how much can a working household > with three part-time developers load a server?), and besides it's been > left on for days on end before now, so get outta the way kid and let me > work! > ... > We can get our feet wet with this without spending any > capital, and if and when it seems necessary we can shell out some real > dough for a real machine.)
There's no clear cut answer. The laptop will break, eventually. And there will no way to show whether it was because it was used as a server or just because its time ran out. I think you have a sound strategy by trying it with the intention of moving to a "real" machine only if necessary. And that real machine may be an old desktop you have lying around or a friend wants to toss. As an anecdote, several years ago we had setup an ssh server for a small non-profit using Ubuntu Server 6.06 on a lowly 365 MHz Celeron with 64 MB of RAM and a 3 GB HDD. We also decided that for easy expandability and maintainability we would keep things simple: one partition, swap in a swapfile, labels on filesystems. By the time that machine was retired almost 3 years later, it had become a time server (ntpd), a cron server (crond), a dynamic DNS updater (ddclient), a proxy server (squid), a web server (apache), a Samba server, and a DHCP server (dhcpd). In that entire time, the machine only went down for kernel updates. So you don't need much to run a small local server. Good luck and let us know how things go. Regards, - Robert _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
