NetBSD on the eeePC

Following on from my last entry, I have gone ahead and installed the very recently released NetBSD 5.0 Release Candidate 1 on my eeePC 701. I installed it from a USB stick as planned, by following this guide. Things went pretty much without incident. About the only think which temporarily stumped is that in order to boot the eeePC from a USB device, you need to press Escape during the initial loading screen - there's nothing written on that screen to indicate this, and in fact the screen instructs you to press one of the F buttons to get a "boot menu", which actually doesn't have a USB option in it. I thought this was a bit counterintuitive.

After the install, the onboard ethernet device didn't seem to be working - the kernel detected it without any issue but when I plugged it into my router the indicator light didn't come on and I couldn't get a DHCP lease. This thread at the overclockers.com.au forums suggests that this is a common problem on the eee after changing the OS. I've no idea how this supposed causal relation could actually exist, but nevertheless I disconnected the power and battery as suggested and ethernet worked just fine. The wireless device is detected but rejected by the default driver. There's supposedly a patch that fixes this, but I haven't tried it yet.

My biggest concern about setting the eee up as a NetBSD server is the fact that it has a solid state hard drive which has a finite life-span - according to some, around 100,000 reads/writes per block. Thus, to maximise the life of the machine, it is important to decrease the amount of repetitive writing that goes on. I have taken a few steps to facilitate this, for instance I have set the machine up with no swap space and mounted all my filesystems with the noatime option - this prevents updating of the "last accessed" timestamp every time a file is read. However, the issue of logging still remains to be dealt with. The /var/log directory is full of files which are written to constantly during the machine's operation, and the HTTP logs for my website will be in much the same category. I think that before I actually deploy the machine as my new server I'll invest in a 4GB or 8GB micro SD card and partition it in two - a small /var partition for all machine related logging and a larger /srv partition that will hold my website and the accompanying logs, as well as the PostgreSQL database for my weather data project.

The other issue that I need to resolve before I completely replace my current big, heavy, noisy, power-hungry server by the almost invisible eee is file storage. In addition to acting as a web and mail server, the current machine has a 200GB hard drive in it which contains my music, videos and other such files, which are NFS exported to my home network so that I can access them from any of my other machines. The eeePC's solid state hard drive is only 4GB big, which is of course too small for this job, and of course I can't physically install an IDE drive or the like inside it to get more space because the machine is tiny. If money were no object I could buy something like Western Digital's Passport portable hard drives, which are quite large in terms of capacity, quite small in terms of physical size and powered entirely by the USB connection. More likely I will end up buying an external case with a USB connection for the IDE drive in the current machine. This will be a lot cheaper, but unfortunately it will consume an extra power outlet and a bit more space.

I'm feeling optimistic about this project for now.