skip to main bit
a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces
      Monsters'

Oblomovka

Currently:

Archive for February 21st, 2016

2016-02-21

home server

Well, that was an embarrassing amount of time having to engineer around forgetting a password. Nothing important lost, but an important lesson: if you write down a password (and you should write down a password), write it down correctly. Being clever and elliptical in the past is just frustrating in the present. Also true of secret societies. Lighten up!

Anyway, the password was for an empty Debian install onto a chromebox which I’d set up, but not actually populated with files and such, so no great loss. Except I had to learn how to install Debian on a chromebox again (shades of “Flowers for Debian” again).

It remains a very promising base for a home server though. Asus Chromeboxen are still around $150, can be upgraded pretty easily, and installing a free operating system on them only costs you 3 sanity rolls, max. The machine is very quiet, tiny, and I think powerful enough if you stick some more RAM and SSD into it. My last home server has been happily doing its thing for a decade, and this, which I’m eying up as a replacement, has the same feel to it.

To be honest, the most exciting part of it was working out a way that I could encrypt its root hard drive, and but somehow let me ssh into it to type in the magic passphrase even before the thing had finished booting. This is a pretty good guide to doing that. Feels like magic to connect into a thing that hasn’t even booted into full Linux.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.