EeeServer

So my old Celeron clunker pretty well died, leaving me without a server for music and internal web stuff. During an OpenSuSE 10.3 update, something bad happened, and ls started returning seg faults. Bad, bad, bad. And this was after rebooting it every few days for months due to hardware glitches. The machine was never stable. I think the motherboard had developed an intermittent short.

Luckily all my data was intact on external drives and in a couple of config files. I justed needed a new home for it.

So, I decided to sacrifice the little EeePC 900A I had picked up. For my personal netbook, I was strongly considering switching to another machine anyway, so it was a cheap option (< $200).

First of all, the default EeePC Linux OS sucks. It is clunky and slow. I figured I could live with that on a server, but there was no way I could install all my server software on it. So I searched around and settled on EeeBuntu as my server OS.

Making a bootable USB stick for a live test and eventual install was a snap. I chose the base install, since I only have a 4GB SSD on the system, and I didn't need all the user apps.

I was very impressed with performance and ease of installation. It was everything I expected from Ubuntu. I turned off X, added my planet install, samba config, and my external drives and it runs beautifully. Best server ever: low power; fast; easy to maintain; built-in keyboard, LCD, and touchpad; built-in UPS; cheap.