[vox-tech] Which distro for file/print/web server

[Alex Mandel]

On 09/26/2010 12:51 PM, Alex Mandel wrote:
> I finally have a small low power contraption on the way to begin my
> foray into a low power network server. Looking around at my options I'm
> not sure what distro to try on it first.
> 
> Here are the requirements:
> SSH/SFTP/SCP
> Samba
> Print Server for Multi-OS (CUPS via Samba probably)
> Apache + mod_wsgi (Trac & Django)
> 
> Optional:
> Web interface to manage it
> 
> FreeNas sounded intriguing but seems to only do the first 2 without a
> lot of arm twisting. So I started looking at Debian and Ubuntu but I
> can't seem to decide which version of those would give me the easiest
> setup. Anyone have and opinion about Debian testing and unstable for
> this purpose, I think Stable doesn't have new enough packages for my needs.
> 
> 
> Also anyone have an opinion on webmin or suggestions for something
> similar that would allow me to manage most of the sharing, printers and
> apache via a web interface?
> 
> Thanks,
> Alex
> 
> FYI I got a Zotac ZBox atom 330 with Nvidia Ion + SSD and an external 2
> TB drive.

Just wanted to follow up to let people know how it worked.
The Zotac box is pretty nice, quiet and low power. My UPS is estimating
about 13 W total usage including the external 2 TB Samsung Green Drive
in a Rosewill case (fan switched on).

I ended up going with 64 bit Ubuntu LTS for simplicity sake. While there
are some ghosts printing from Vista/7 to a samba shared printer seems to
be working most of the time, linux boxes are printing via cups.

The big downside I realized today, you can't get any HD stats on an
external USB drive(smartmontools). So I've got no health monitoring of
the disk. I would say that given a decent NAS where you can pick the OS
(not the strange hacked versions of Debian,etc) would be a winner over
my setup for that feature alone. Of course I wasn't able to find such a
NAS anywhere near my other requirements of low power and lower cost.

Another thing to note, APC seems to be moving towards proprietary
battery shapes. Which means down the line you'll have to pay $100 for a
battery that you can normally get for $20 just because the connectors
and shapes don't fit in the box. I managed to get an older model which
has a nifty feature - master power control: when the master device is
off, 3 other power ports get switched off too. Silly part is those can
only be on the surge side, so no way to have it turn off my monitor
automatically and also have my monitor on the battery side too.

I have not tried installing web software for management of the box yet.

Thanks,
Alex