Plans for the PogoPlug

So a while back I bought a PogoPlug that was on sale: $40 for a little 1.2GHz server w/256MB RAM, 512MB flash and 4 USB ports. Such a deal! These instructions got me Debian, and I named the thing Kaboing. I thought I'd set up our websites on it, get rid of the noisy old P4 I had. Then it sort of fell by the wayside...

...until the Great Electrical Anomoly/Hardware Harvest of 2012 (the Mayans tried to warn us!). Now I'm hosting stuff at Linode, and it's time to get working on this.

Right now I've got three USB flash drives attached to the thing: 1GB for swap and root, 512MB for /var/lib/mysql, and 2GB for home. This is a tight fit, especially the root; I've got about 100MB free there after excluding man pages, documentation and the like. Mind you, this does give me the usual stuff I'd put on a server: Emacs, LAMP, dstat, yadda yadda. (Man, remember when...)

I've also got an external 500GB hard drive that I've been using for backup (and which saved my ass when the P4 broke), and I plan on using that more. Home directories, definitely; MySQL possibly too. I'm worried about wearing out the random USB drives I've thrown into this thing, or silent corruption of the files stored on it. (That might be silly.)

The load on the machine is something I'll have to think about. I've decided on Nginx for the server -- good chance to get familiar w/it -- but I think I might stick Squid or some such in front of it. My site is static, but my wife's and my sister-in-law's are Wordpress sites, and I think I'll notice a real slowdown there if I'm not careful. (Though my wife just announced that she's quitting her blog, at least for now...sniff...double shame, 'cos her site easily got 10x the traffic mine ever did. :-))

Anyhow...I keep reminding myself I can take my time with this.