Repurposing the eeePC as a power-efficient webserver

Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to repurposing my eeePC and using it as a replacement for the old desktop machine which I currently use as a server for this website, my email and a private fileserver for my home. The current machine is an old Compaq Deskpro that I bought for the purpose on eBay, mostly on account of its relatively low form factor (it's perhaps 10cm tall, 30cm wide and 40cm deep) and power consumption.

Of course, the eeePC leaves this thing for dead when it comes to form factor and power consumption. It could comfortably sit in a desk draw, freeing up space under my desk, and it consumes at most a mere 21 Watts, saving me money on electricity and also cutting down on the amount of heat that accumulates in the room its in, which is full of computers. Not only do I get these savings, but - in an astonishing testament to the power of miniaturisation - the eeePC actually has a faster processor and more RAM, so I'd get a performance increase as well.

Another persuasive factor is that, by virtue of having a battery in it, the eeePC has a kind of primitive built-in UPS. It won't immediately power down during a blackout like my current machine would. In some sense this is a moot point - if the power goes out then my cable modem and router are going to go out with it and so having my actual server still running would not be of much use. I can still see some benefit in it, though: if I'm out of the house between 9 and 5 and the power goes off for 10 minutes at 10 o'clock, then with my eeePC running the show my server downtime will be 10 minutes, since when the modem and router come back on the server will be ready and waiting. With the batteryless desktop machine, the downtime would the 7 hours that the machine sits there waiting for somebody to physically turn it on again. That's a significant difference!

Finally, like everyone I occasionally make a stupid accidental change to my server's network settings while fiddilng with it over ssh. This change kills my ssh session immediately so in order to do it I need to locate a spare monitor and keyboard and crawl under my desk to fix it. It's a real pain. With an eeePC server I could just scoop the thing up, drop it in my lap, open it and go.

About the only downside that I can come up with to this plan is that it means no longer having my eeePC as an all-purpose portable unit. I'm not sure how big of a loss this is. For all my initial excitement, I have to admit that I've not been a particularly big user of the thing. Most of my time is spent at home or at university, and I have desktop computers at both of those places which are more powerful than the eeePC. I also own an IBM Thinkpad which is not all that less convenient to carry around than the eeePC (although I didn't have this machine at the time I acquired the eee). The idea of putting a USB GPS device in the eee and writing some sort of clever spatially-aware software still intrigues me, but I can only see it being of real use for someone who does a lot of moving about in interesting areas, like orienteering or caving (would GPS receivers get signal in a cave?). All I tend to do is catch buses into the city and back. Even if I was more active, the 701's battery life is disappointingly short and I doubt it would last the length of a good hiking sessions or bike ride. So I don't see much actual loss in losing the eee as a general machine. Anyway, if I ever do think of an awesome project for one, they'll probably be so damned cheap by then that it won't be a hardship to get another one.

I'm not sure when to actually make the transition. I'd like to install NetBSD on it instead of using the kinda gross default Linux distribution. This should be an educational experience, since the eee has no built-in optical drive and I don't own a USB one. I'll probably end up installing it from a USB stick as per this guide. The big question is whether or not I wait for NetBSD 5.0 to come out before I do this or to just install 4.0 now and upgrade later...