I run my own web server at home. This little computer is my web server and mail server. I used to have a NSLU2 with Debian Linux. The NSLU2 (also known as Slug) is a little NAS that can also run some software. The NSLU2 has a 223MHz processor and 32MBRAM. That’s not a lot, but it was enough to run a simple web server, a mail server, and a DLNA server. There were some limitations though. The web server could only server static pages – things with server-side scripting (PHP), or databases (MySQL), are simple to heavy for that server. Having a big list and serving that through a DLNA server also caused problem.

So I decided to upgrade my little server. The requirements were a little, silent, and low-energy server. I decided on the SheevaPlug, a small plug-shaped computer. It has 1.2GHz processor, 512MB ram, 512MB internal flash memory, one USB port, a slot for memory cards, and a network port. This thing is a lot faster. It still runs Debian, with a web server, a mail server (IMAP and SMTP), it can download torrents, it is a DLNA media server, and it is powerful enough (sort of) to serve things like WordPress through PHP and MySQL.

While maintaining this server, I discovered a lot of things. Little tweaks that make the whole system run better. Or changes that I had to make the make the software run. I finally decided to publish all those things on a web site. In the first place, so I can’t forget, but also because other might run into the same problems.