Sunday, February 24, 2013

The beginning

And it starts.  I've consumed so many helpful guides, how-to's, opinions and the like that I felt the world needed one more blog.  So here it is.  This blog will initially be focused on the untimely death (and hopefully resurrection) of my self-hosted web server.  I acquired a Google/Samsung Chromebox from Google IO 2012 and decided to re-purpose a somewhat limited cloud pc, into my general web/media server.

The system is very quiet and small, ideal for being co-located with my TV and audio system.  Pretty decent specs, Intel Dual-Core Celeron i5, 4 GB RAM, 16 GB SSD, etc, etc... But for my uses running Ubuntu as a server, needed some upgrades.   After some inspiration from this article, I started out with some upgrades. For starters, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM.  Secondly, I wanted at least 64 GB of disk space for linux.  Turns out, swapping in a new SSD would prove troublesome.  After working with some folks on Google Groups trying to do the same thing, I decided to go with a faster 128 GB SSD than stock, even though it meant I needed to do some tricks when cold-booting the Chromebox.  At least this way I can reuse it when the Intel NUC i5 comes out in April of 2013. Oh, and lastly, to store all the multimedia I have (about 4 TB with), I attached a 4 drive external RAID over USB 2.0 using 4 2TB drives. BTW, the RAID makes an excellent replacementfor a christmas tree, what with the massive amount of blinking LEDs.

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