I've run into problems with Kaboing, the Pogoplug I picked up and have been slowly prepping for use as my home web/email/SSH server. First, it stopped recognizing the USB stick that had the root filesystem, and would boot into the stock Pogoplug environment instead...which is still Linux, but not my Linux.
I tried installing the root on another USB stick, thinking that the
old one was, well, old (it was one of n I have lying around the
house). But that didn't work either: I still kept getting the
Pogoplug environment instead. I tried removing extra sticks (I had
three attached), leaving me with just one (new) stick and an external
USB hard drive; still didn't work.
After much futzing about, I got it down to this behaviour: every other warm reboot works, mostly. By that I mean that every second warm reboot seems to detect at least the USB stick with the root FS, and sometimes the external hard drive, and boots up into my Linux (running Debian, natch); the other times, the stick(s) aren't detected and the plug decides to boot into the Pogoplug Linux instead.
I'm not the only one who's tripped over this. I've tried various things and haven't come up with a solution yet. I think an awful hack will be to put some kind of timed reboot into the Pogoplug environment. But I don't like that idea very much, and I wish I knew what was going on.
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.