Well, I finally got around to finishing doing all the installs and setup on the Blade 150 I had laying around. In the end, since it only had 1gb of RAM and only 1 600 Mhz UltraSPARC II processor, I decided to go with FreeBSD instead of Solaris.
Initially, Solaris worked great serving up a webpage, however, the fact that I did a whole install and the fact that solaris is not exactly speedy on older hardware made working with it a little painful. If unattended, the next time I accessed the machine it would take a few seconds to spin up before allowing a login or serving a webpage. The fact that I left mostly all of the daemons running didn’t help. Yea, I know I could have disabled them all, I just like started clean rather than having to clean up.
Enter FreeBSD. I decided to stay away from Linux also, short of a Gentoo install (which would be painfully slow to compile everything), it’s an extremely easy way to get a minimal install with the smallest amount of effort. That and I enjoy using different things, time to brush up on the BSD knowledge since it’s been a couple of years since I’ve used it. Anyhow, now the machine is running FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE with a pretty vanilla install. I set up Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP for a web service so I can teach Delilah PHP one of these days. I also set up ajaxterm so I can access a command-line from places where SSH is blocked completely *cough*work*cough* in the event of an emergency.
Overall, I’m liking it more than Solaris, it’s certainly a lot more snappy and much easier to get all the things I want using ports than trying to mess with doing a build from source on Solaris.
You can check out my extremely weaksauce main page here:
Anyone have any suggestions for what else I should use it for? Let me know in the comments!
How about a tor node? Then the government can ransack your house when “you” seem to be producing odd internet traffic.
Link | October 17th, 2007 at 6:59 am