Friday, January 7, 2011

Server - eeepc - Hardware

v 0.1

I have an Asus eeepc 701 netbook, which I bought several years ago when they were first released.  I used it extensively over the next year as my travel computer and it did a great job.  I left the default Xandros Linux operating system on it, installing Debian Lenny onto an SD card as an alternative - that worked really well.

The poor machine has been lying dormant for a while, and the thought of using it as a home server has been niggling at me.  So what does it have going for it?

  • 4 gig SSD
  • Processing power about a third of my Pentium 4 3.0 Desktop computer
  • 1 gig memory (I added some extra)
  • 3 USB ports
  • SD Card Slot
  • Ethernet port
  • Wireless networking
  • Very low power useage

The final part of the mix is storage - the internal SSD will be used almost exclusively for the operating system, so I had a thought about external HDD units.  I finally settled on a Seagate 2.5 inch 1 terrabyte drive.  It is powered exclusively through the USB port, so will draw significantly less power than a 3.5 inch drive.

Obviously this will be no powerhouse home media centre, however I can see that it would be useful in so many other areas, particularly since it will cost so little to run.  Of course the most important thing as far as I am concerned is that I have a low cost test bed to learn on.

Well, there I have my hardware setup.  Works smoothly and sits there unobtrusively.



Next, the Software and options to think about.....

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