The Littlest Server

I have eight computers in my house.  The wife and I each have a “main” machine, identical Dell XPS machines we bought a few years back.  We have a Media PC where we download and watch TV shows (it has 6 analog tuners, which was awesome until Comcast ditched analog and the PC can’t handle 6 digital tuners, but it makes a good media server).  There is a PC in the bedroom (when the last DVD player died we just moved an old PC in there to watch stuff on – bonus, it lets us watch Netflix Instant in bed).  There is an iMac, which barely gets any use at all, but we sometimes drop it in a room that we want to stream music to.  I have a netbook and the wife uses my old laptop for portable computing around the house and out of the house.  And lastly my wife’s old laptop that she lugged to England while she went to university over there about 8 years ago.

As someone who does web development for a living, one thing I’ve always lacked at home was a server.  Sure, I’ve installed the dev environments on my main machine to be able to test things out, but I’ve never had a server that worked like a real server.  Monday I decided to rectify that.  Not wanting to buy a new machine I had to repurpose an existing one.  Obviously, the main machines were out, as was the Media PC, the bedroom PC, the netbook and the laptop the wife uses.  So my options were the iMac or the decade old HP laptop.  The iMac still serves a purpose, and not just as the occasional music streamer, but from a web development standpoint I sometimes use it to see what sites I build look like under other browsers.  I might still turn it into a server one day, for now though I went with the HP laptop.

The HP Pavilion n5150 latop.  This beast had Windows ME installed on it.  Yes, I said Windows ME.  This, above all other reasons, was why it was chosen for the server.  Plus, I like the idea of being able to put the server on a shelf out of the way where it doesn’t take up much space.  My current webhost (Dreamhost, who I am very happy with) uses Debian OS based servers.  As such, I decided that Debian would be my choice as well.  I downloaded the network install ISO, burned a disc, put it in the laptop and booted up.  It took about 2 hours, maybe 3, to finish (the network install puts the base OS on and then downloads everything else).  Clearly, the PIII-600MHz processor, the 256MB RAM and 10GB HD are woefully below the specs of a PC you’d actually want to use these days, but as a little web server it chugs along just fine.  Then I put MySQL and a few other bits on it and it is ready.

I am excited as I move into the next phases of my own little side projects, both the business app that will make me rich and the zombie web games that I’ve always wanted to build.