Well, as we make progress on the Little House in the Village, the time has come to install its Home Server. This sophisticated computing system will monitor various systems throughout the house, provide security monitoring, generate reports that will get posted to the ‘cloud’ so we can access it from anywhere, and provide a webserver that will act as a portal to access the information locally. In evaluating the needs of this system, I decided that it was time to switch over to Linux since I only need server functions and don’t want the overhead and unreliability of a desktop GUI.
So, without further ado, let me introduce the Little House in the Village Webserver:
The Little House in the Village Home Server
It’s there, really! See that little clear box in the foreground…
Here’s a closer view…
View showing the Server and its hard drive.
Closeup of the top of the Server
View showing the network and power connections.
View showing the USB, SD card, and microHDMI connections.
So you think this looks like a toy? Well, its a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 512MB RAM, 2GB Boot MMC memory, micro-SD slot (where I could put up to 32GB of SD memory), 10/100 Ethernet, USB 2.0 Host & Client connections, and HDMI video output.
Natively it will boot a Linux desktop based on Angstrom without any additional hardware. I have it set up with a 2GB boot SD Card which boots up an ubuntu Linux Server and then switches over to a 160GB hard drive attached to the USB port. I currently have it set up with Apache2, MySQL 5.5, PHP 5.1, and WordPress.
I don’t need a local display or keyboard since I can login over the network via ssh.
Here are some various screen shots…
Logged in, showing the contents of a system directory.
Showing system stats. Not very busy right now...
The Little House in the Village Web Portal
Oh, and one other thing. This little powerhouse consumes about 4 watts (including hard drive) 
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