ASUS EeePC server review – a few months on

In late October last year I successfully got my ASUS EeePC running as a web server for this blog. (Read more about it here.) A few things have happened – including the power going out in our apartment – which prompted an update on how well it’s working for me.

(I’m a strong believer that the best reviews are those that look at long-term durability under real world situations. Usually this is a problem because technology moves so fast, but I think these computers will be around for a while yet.)

Battery as a UPS
I planned to use the battery as an uninterruptible power supply. If I ever needed to remove the power cable I’d just put the battery back in (it draws less power when it’s out) and feel confident that it won’t turn off for at least a few minutes. I’ve had to do this a number of times and it works perfectly!

Ethernet versus wi-fi
I don’t trust wireless connections as much as I do ethernet ones so I chose to physically remove the wireless card. This was perhaps a mistake. We rearranged our bedrooms and rather than be encumbered by multiple ethernet cables running across doorways I decided it was time to put the wireless card back in and see how reliably it worked. Not only is it reliable and responsible for less cable clutter; I no longer have to worry about downtime when temporarily removing the ethernet cable which I had to do occasionally. I don’t know how much additional power the wireless card is drawing, but I think it’s justified. (I’m now even tempted to set my desktop PC up with a wireless card and move into the twenty-first century!)

ADSL downtime
We have a problem with either the phone connection going to our apartment or our modem. This problem results in our modem getting disconnected occasionally and having to re-establish a connection. If it was regular I’d think it was the modem, but we have bad days where it just can’t connect for a few hours at a time and long stretches where we may have no issues for weeks at a time. My suspicion is that it has something to do with wet weather.

Anyway, the point is, if you’re hosting content of any kind and absolutely need it to be reliable, it’s best to get a professional company to look after it. If you strongly prefer to have it hosted locally, just make sure you have a reliable connection. For me this isn’t too much of an issue – this is more of a hobby project and I have hardly any readers.

Power
Last night, as previously mentioned, we lost power to our apartment. This lasted for more than four hours. Though rare, this revealed one important flaw in the ASUS EeePC that I hadn’t previously noticed: there is no BIOS option to turn back on when receiving power (common to desktop computers). This makes perfect sense; it’s a laptop that is not intended as a server, so this would not be seen as a useful feature.

What this means is that any time the power goes out – even temporarily, if you remove the battery to reduce power consumption like I to – you need to wait until power comes back to manually turn the computer on again. (I was asleep when power returned, so my blog was down for about twelve hours!)

(There’s actually a hack people have used to trick it into triggering ‘Wake-on-LAN’ actions when regaining power, but this requires the computer going into standby mode – read: having the battery in, which is a deal-breaker for me.)

Conclusion
This is a great server setup, though it does have a few limitations. If you have a reliable ADSL connection and you’re not too worried about losing power, I highly recommend it. But if you need a bit more reliability you may need to sacrifice the convenience of the attached monitor and trackpad, the lower power consumption, and much of the associated street cred, for a more traditional PC with the common ‘wake on power’ BIOS option.

Comments and spam

The biggest technical problem I’ve come across since this blog went live on my server is that I couldn’t get comment email notifications working.  If someone comments, I had to manually check my comments summary page regularly in order to find out.  The issue is that I do not have an SMTP server running on the server, so the following takes place:

WordPress: Hey, SMTP server! Someone just commented! exhipigeonist will be totally stoked to hear about this!
WordPress: Uhhh, you’re quiet tonight.  Anyway, I was wondering if you could do me a favour and, you know, email people when this sort of thing happens. Options have been checked, intentions have been made, etc.
WordPress: I choose to read your silence as a ‘Yes’!  There, it’s out of my hands now and not my problem.  I don’t even have to check that it happened and give a confirmation message to anyone.  Time for a break!  *goes off to expel excess RAM into the memory pool*

I’m a little surprised this isn’t a standard thing the installation checks (or if it does, notifies the installer) during setup.  Anyway, I finally fixed it yesterday by configuring the WP Mail SMTP plug-in to use my gmail account to send notifications.  This is not optimal, especially as I’m trying to reduce my dependency on Google services, but I at least have it set up so it appears to be from my admin address.

While I was fixing comment settings I decided to deal with some of the spam I had been receiving.  I’ve been getting regular comments on various posts advertising laptop batteries.  I just delete them because they’re nonsense or irrelevant and appear to be from spambots.  I set up a filter so these have to be moderated while legitimate comments are likely to go through.

However, this morning I awoke to a moderated comment on my robot cupcake entry which said,

Short Circuit 1+2 were good movies 🙂 “Los locos kick your ass. Los locos kick your face. Los locos kick your balls into outer space!”

I’d recently re-watched the second movie and, even though I know such comments (or more specifically, the name and its link) are designed to game Internet search results, and I in no way endorse the products, I thought this comment was cute and just had to let it through.

It also makes it clear that there are actual people going through blogs and writing comments.  It’s not just an automated process.

So I put it to you, spammers (who probably won’t read this): entertain me, make me laugh, and I just might approve your comments.

Update: Probably related, shortly after publishing this post I began receiving large amounts of spam.

I have revised my stance on allowing spam; all of it will be deleted, even if it is entertaining.  (I have even removed the comment I mentioned in this post.)  In fact, I have set WordPress to moderate all comments, making it impossible for spam to get through at all.  Unfortunately, this also harms legitimate discussion until I can think of a better way around it.

Why did I ever think it was a good idea to provoke spammers?  *facepalm*

You are here

Earlier this year I mentioned to my dad I’d like to set up a web server at home. I’d want something second-hand with low power consumption that has an SSD and is effectively silent. You know, kinda like an ASUS EeePC. Dad had the crazy idea that I could actually just use an EeePC. ‘Brilliant’, I thought, and shortly got a 900A model very cheap from the Internet.

( I know I can host a wordpress blog with my domain name using my ISP’s webspace, and that this might actually be much easier, but this would mean I couldn’t play around with technology and have as much fun!)

I initially tried Ubuntu 11.04 on it but had a few small, technical problems. That, and I hated the Unity interface. For some reason I had it in my head that Ubuntu would be an easier distribution to use as a web server than Linux Mint 11, which I use on my other computers. I finally replaced it last week and, after many hours spent installing and reinstalling WordPress, it worked! I thought it could be nice to celebrate my week of uptime by posting a few photos of my physical server setup.

Click for full-size version

Internet, this is my web (and printer) server, sheeelob. (You can thank Cassie for the great name idea!) sheeelob lives on my desk under a small, wooden bookcase thing(?) that I once found on the side of the road. I leave the battery out to conserve power, but leave it close by for emergency relocations or power cable rearranging. Keeping the system simple, only essential programs have been installed – look how tidy the desktop is! That big orange thing is the security cable that makes it extremely inconvenient to use an external monitor.

(And to answer your question, yes, the composition of the above photo did take into account the prominence of my dinosaur card.)

Click for full-size version

And when I’m not configuring software or transferring images manually (I’ll eventually set it up so I can do all of this externally) sheeelob slides neatly out of the way.

 

Images appearing in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.