NetBSD on the eeePC continued

Three consecutive entries on the same topic!

I bought a 4GB SDHC card for my eeePC server a few days ago. I used fdisk, disklabel and newfs to replace the default FAT32 partition on it with a 256MB /var partition (far larger than I am likely to ever need, but storage space is cheap these days and the pain of a full /var is great) and a partition taking up the rest of the space which I'll use for my websites and web logs, my Postgres databases, etc. I edited /etc/fstab so that these partitions are mounted automatically on boot up and everything seems to just work. There now should be relatively few files on the eee's SSD which are regularly overwritten. I'm actually quite inexperienced with removable media like SD(HC) and USB sticks and the solid state technology behind them (since I cut my Unix teeth at around the time floppy disks were starting to disappear in favour of CDs). Having now done a little bit of research (to find out, for instance, if my eeePC could read an SDHC as opposed to SD card), I'm not sure of the extent to which the general paranoia about SSD life is warranted - wear levelling technology seems to do a lot to alleviate the issue and is apparently fairly wide spread. At any rate, SD(HC) cards are cheap enough that the extra caution can't really hurt.

I've transferred my HTTP(S) and SMTP services to the eeePC and things seem to be running quite nicely. My old server is still running for the purpose of providing NFS and Samba access to the large collection of multimedia files that I don't have room for on the eee, but once I buy an external hard drive case I will transfer that over too and retire the old machine. If you notice any problems with web or mail services here in the next few days it's probably just me ironing out bugs. At any rate, all of the most complicated and critical work in this project is pretty much wrapped up and I'm really happy with how smoothly it went.

For now my main concern is where abouts I'm going to put the thing! I'd rather not keep it on the floor under my desk like my previous server, because obviously it's a lot less physically sturdy and I'd hate to accidentally step on it. I'm not too fond of the idea of putting it on my desk, either, because it would take up space which is at a serious premium, and also puts the machine at risk of having coffee spilt on it or the like. I'd really like to be able to keep it in a desk drawer - out of sight and out of mind. I could drill a hole in the back panel of the drawer large enough to feed the power cable and ethernet connection through. My only concern with this is whether or not there would be sufficient ventilation to keep the thing running at a safe temperature. I'm already a little bit nervous about running the eee with the lid permanently closed, especially since ordinarily the keyboard acts as a heatsink (see, e.g., step 5 of this disassembly guide). Other eeePC users have asked about this very issue before and the consensus seems to be that there isn't much of a problem with doing it, but I have to assume that most people who claim to have done it without problems weren't also keeping the thing stuck in a drawer. I could always drill a whole bunch of ventilation holes in the back of the drawer, or even remove the back panel entirely, I guess. I've also thought that I could stick one of those novelty USB fans in there with it to improve the airflow over the machine and out the holes at the back, but I've never actually seen one of those fans in real life so I'm not sure how much noise they make. If it's a lot, they could be a really annoying solution.