Home Server Moving to Ubuntu

The Home Server

After running Fedora 10 (EOL'ed Decemter 2009) on my home server for over three years, it's time to upgrade to a newer distro. For better, long-term security supports, CentOS 6 (6.2 is the latest as of the writing) was my 1st candidate to replace the old system, with five more years support till 2017.  I'd like to do it green so burning CDs thing is not an option! With netinstall ISO images populated to the Grub startup options, along with full DVD ISOs mounted as an HTTP share from another temporary web server, we're ready to have fun. My home server is a 12-year old Acer TravelMate 341 equipped with Pentium III 500 MHz CPU and 192 MB RAM. Albeit trivial from today's hardware spec, it still fits my needs like running Web, DHCPd, routing/firewalling/tunnelling, and even SETI'ing.

Acer TravelMate 341, bought in Y2K.

Now What?

I got an error message saying not enough memory to install CentOS after booting the installer.  Even it's listed in the release notes of CentOS 6.2 as a known issue that the installer needs at least 392 MB of memory to work, I still have no idea why a simple task like installers do needs that much of memory.  It SUCKS!

Back in 2009, I replaced all my Fedora desktops to Ubuntu desktop edition because of the Ubuntu superiority but being an RHCE I still want to keep servers running Red Hat distros for some reasons.  But not any more.

Precise Pangolin

Per hardware requirement of Ubuntu 12.04 Server edition, 64 MB is minimal so we're fine with 192 MB. The light-weighted text mode installer looks elegant and the installation took some time less than an hour for the legacy laptop as the whole process is somehow IO bound. Here we have latest kernel 3.2 running on vintage hardware.

More tech info follows:

CPU info:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor       : 0

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel

cpu family      : 6

model           : 8

model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)

stepping        : 1

microcode       : 0x2

cpu MHz         : 498.977

cache size      : 256 KB

   :

[Removed for brevity]

Top 10 memory consumers:

top - 07:16:09 up  8:54,  1 user,  load average: 0.68, 0.65, 0.68
Tasks:  66 total,   1 running,  65 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.6%us,  0.6%sy, 31.9%ni, 67.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    183888k total,   158572k used,    25316k free,     3952k buffers
Swap:   352252k total,     6028k used,   346224k free,    50496k cached

 PID  USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 6336 hub       39  19 37104  34m   16 S 31.6 19.4  15:51.47 setiathome_6.03
  907 mysql     20   0  319m  30m 3404 S  0.3 17.2   2:55.00 mysqld
 1055 www-data  20   0 35088 8396 2704 S  0.0  4.6   0:58.57 php-cgi
 6909 hub       20   0  9108 5920 1524 S  0.0  3.2   0:03.28 bash
 4007 hub       20   0 15296 3984 2752 S  0.6  2.2   0:53.95 boinc
  912 snmp      20   0  9984 2928 1736 S  0.0  1.6   0:20.72 snmpd
 6777 root      20   0  9600 2928 2328 S  0.0  1.6   0:00.44 sshd
 6902 hub       20   0  9600 1820 1212 S  0.1  1.0   0:00.06 sshd
  988 www-data  20   0  5792 1772  704 S  0.0  1.0   0:04.42 lighttpd
  891 dhcpd     20   0  5068 1552  968 S  0.0  0.8   0:00.09 dhcpd

The welcome message:

Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-24-generic-pae i686)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

  System information as of Tue May  1 06:08:14 CST 2012

  System load:  0.38              Processes:           67

  Usage of /:   19.6% of 5.24GB   Users logged in:     0

  Memory usage: 17%               IP address for eth1: 192.168.XX.XX

  Swap usage:   1%                IP address for ppp0: XX.XX.XX.XX