Ground Control

So the time has come to carry out an OS upgrade on my trusty EEE Box server. This is a lovely small low powere machine that just sits on my network and acts as a Samba Server, FTP, server, Termninal Server and an SSH server. At the moment it's runing PCLinuxOS 2009 and has 5 terminal sessions running all the time. This is all accomplished with an Intel Atom CPU and 2GB of RAM.

The OS is basically an update PCLinuxOS 2007 and is now showing it's age a bit so I'm going to go install a new OS and having run through a few, I find once again that PCLinuxOS 2010 seems to be one of the most stable, easy to install and use operating systems arround.

I'm writing this article as I carry out the install and apart from the machines normal functions, I am also going to install a CMS on it, possibly Joomla but at this point I haven't decided yet.

I will also be installing wemin for easy remote maintenance of the server and it will also have Crossover Office installed so I can run Grabit.

I'd love to show you some more pictures of the little thing, but in the 20 or seconds I spent searching this is the only one that came up.

The machine itself has a 250Gb drive installed, but once up and running I'll be adding more storage in the form of 2 x 1TB external drives. 1 of these will store all my media, pictures and music and the other will be the backup drive. I'll be using rsync to copy the data over about 3 or 4 times a day.

I'll also be mounting a 680Gb drive as my ftp store, once I get another drive I'll once again set up an rsync routine to copy the data over every night.

The reason I do this is that the data I have on the machines is more valuable than the hardware.

And then finally, I'll install a printer and share it out on my network.

So without further ado, here's how it goes with any problems I run into along the way.