On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 05:45:51 +1000, Phil Scarratt wrote:
> 2. Small form factor pc with some sort of solid state memory running linux.
I'm doing this at home. I'm running a cut-down ubuntu dapper
installation, initially installed as a breezy server then any packages I
didn't need removed, followed by a dist-upgrade to dapper when it was
released. It has about 200 packages and uses less than 300MB of flash.
The h/w is one of those VIA PCs that Vini Engel was selling a month or
two ago. I've added a PCI NIC (an SMC card which was small enough to
fit in the case) and a PCMCIA NIC to give me LAN, WAN and DMZ. It took
some work to install the PCI NIC -- there were no holes in the back of
the case for it and the power connector was a bit too close to the PCI
slot, but it wasn't hard, just fiddly.
It runs off a 512MB CF card via a CF-IDE adapter, because although the
board has a CF slot the BIOS can't boot from it. Apparently there is a
BIOS upgrade available but I couldn't find it easily, and the CF-IDE
adapter wasn't expensive enough for me to care.
The box has a fan, but it's very quiet. I could probably disconnect it
without anything overheating, but the noise is insignificant -- there
are other much more noisy things in the room :-)
I did make a few changes to reduce the number of writes to the CF card
to extend its life:
- mount / noatime
- use tmpfs for /tmp (with a max size limit so it can't take all
the RAM)
- no swap
- syslog to a LAN host and stop syslog being restarted each day if
there are no local log files (causes a write to /dev)
- change ntp.conf so that the drift file is in /tmp and copy it to
/var once a week if it's changed (and on boot/shutdown).
I think that was all.
> The only caveat is that it (the fw) has to allow for a DMZ, and may have
> to run multiple internet (WAN) connections (I am currently
I don't know whether any of the VIA motherboards have more than one PCI
slot. If not, you'd need to use a case with enough room for a larger
PCI card with more than one network port, or use a USB ethernet adaptor.
Cheers,
John
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Nothing is perfect. Not even Windows sucks perfectly.
-- Jay Maynard
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