Following up on the decTOP mini-PC group buy:

My decTOP now sits tucked away in an otherwise-wasted corner of my desk, quietly working as a LAMP server on my LAN. It doesn’t actually serve up pages to the outside world, what with Comcast taking a dim view of people running servers from home. Instead, it lets me play around with Stupid Apache Tricks without the very real risk of me inadvertently wiping out my blog during a bout of temporary stupidity, and, as a consequence, having to beg the techs at my hosting company to clean up my mess for me.

And really, it’s PERFECT for the job.  It’s nearly silent (and once I set up hdparm to spin down the hard drive during idle times, it will be completely silent).  Since it draws only 8 watts, it doesn’t heat up my room like my dual-G5 system. That trivial power draw also means that, should the power go out, my UPS can keep it running for, oh, a decade or so. And by running it headless and doing everything over ssh, I don’t have to add any more peripherals to my already-horrendous clutter.

The only change I’ve made so far was dropping in a 512 MB RAM chip so it can run everything without swapping to disk. I’ll eventually change out the hard drive for something more capacious, but 10 gigs is more than enough space for now. I also went ahead and installed Xfce so I can use the decTOP as a desktop system if the need should arise.

Overall, it was $85 well spent. Recommended.