Monday, June 13, 2011

Old Desktop + SSH = Priceless

     I've had an old Dell tower laying around for a while. A year or so ago I used it to test out distros without the fear of botching up my main PC, and for a minute I believed I might actually start using that lovely Pentium 4 again for daily tasks. Then I realized that I don't use desktops. I use laptops. VortexBox sounded like a great idea. For those who don't know, and are too lazy to click the link, you pop in a CD full of music and it automatically gets ripped and tagged. On top of that the cover art gets downloaded, and you have a lovely little multimedia streaming device. Then I realized that my 30GB hard drive wouldn't hold that many music files, especially music files that have .flac on the end. After a year of collecting dust the old relic has returned to life...as a server. 
     I considered a LAMP server, then I realized I don't need a LAMP server. What I do need is a place to store 15 or 20 distributions that I keep hopping and a handful of files I'd really like to back up in a secure-ish place. Ubuntu Server made it pretty mindless. And now for a pretty abstract step by step. 
  1. Download Ubuntu Server
  2. Install Samba and OpenSSH (and CUPS if you want)
  3. Make IP address static. 
  4. Filezilla. 
     For now I'll leave it at this, and let you learn the power of www.google.com






No comments:

Post a Comment