Jason Schwanz dot com

Semi-homemade Storage

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Technology

I’m currently undertaking a labor of love. My wife would say I’m just playing around I’m building a file/print/web server for use at home. Here’s what it’s currently made of:

• AMD K6-2 350 MHz
• 64 MB RAM
• One 3 Gig HD (/boot and swap partitions)
• One 120 Gig HD (root partition)
• Gentoo Linux 2005.0 (kernel gentoo-sources 2.6.11-r11)

I’m trying to update all of the currently installed packages (the core system packages), as well as install the packages that I will need to make it a file (cifs and samba), print (cups), and web server (apache and php).

At a former job I got to work with a network admin who used Gentoo. My previous linux experiences had solely been with SuSE or Red Hat. I hadn’t ever heard of Gentoo before then, but after working with him to setup my first Gentoo box I haven’t turned back. At some point I might check out the Fedora Project, but for now I’m quite satisfied with the customizability I can have with Gentoo. Since my processor and RAM are pretty minimal I’m going to keep this installation very minimal for the time being.