my green alix 2c3 box

This is my beloved fanless 24x7 box: Alix 2c3 board, consisting of:

• CPU: AMD Geode x86 500MHz, 256MB RAM, 2x USB2.0, 3x LAN 100Mb, 1xMiniPCI
  (from http://pcengines.ch/)
  
• CardFlash 4GB (as root filesystem)
• WD Passport 500Mb (USB 2.0), using board's power via USB
  
• Power supply: DC 12V 20W :-D

I tried several x86 OSes on it:

1. OpenBSD 4.4: by far the easiest and +straightforward installation via PXE
   
2. Debian stable: all Debian versatility thru your serial console installation :)
3. Voyage Linux: 1-shot copy-to-CF (no PXE needed) && boot'it && apt-get'em =)

After some back&forth, I finally kept Voyage Linux, mostly because of

• debian versatility
• apt-get install screen ;)
  
• fully tuned for flash => root filesystem is booted readonly, with all the writable noise kept in memory by using aufs (union fs) and tmpfs
  
• smaaaaall (merely less than ~150Mb after install)
• openssl/OCF by default
• hardware watchdog, rng, aes support by default
  

Hardware info:

• /proc/cpuinfo
  

  processor       : 0
  vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
  cpu family      : 5
  model           : 10
  model name      : Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS
  stepping        : 2
  cpu MHz         : 498.056
  cache size      : 128 KB
  fdiv_bug        : no
  hlt_bug         : no
  f00f_bug        : no
  coma_bug        : no
  fpu             : yes
  fpu_exception   : yes
  cpuid level     : 1
  wp              : yes
  flags           : fpu de pse tsc msr cx8 sep pge cmov clflush mmx mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
  bogomips        : 997.25
  clflush size    : 32
  power management:

• lspci
  

  00:01.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] Host Bridge (rev 33)
  00:01.2 Entertainment encryption device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Geode LX AES Security Block
  00:09.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6105M [Rhine-III] (rev 96)
  00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6105M [Rhine-III] (rev 96)
  00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6105M [Rhine-III] (rev 96)
  00:0f.0 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] ISA (rev 03)
  00:0f.2 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] IDE (rev 01)
  00:0f.4 USB Controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] OHC (rev 02)
  00:0f.5 USB Controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] EHC (rev 02)
  

• lsusb
  

  Bus 002 Device 002: ID 1058:0704 Western Digital Technologies, Inc.
  Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
  Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

• lsmod | egrep geode (special hardware)
  

  geodewdt                4500  2             ## watchdog
  geode_rng               1920  0             ## random number generator
  rng_core                3716  1 geode_rng
  geode_aes               5508  0             ## aes cipher
  

Some measurements/stats:

• HDD /USB 2.0 throughput:
  

  jjolix:~# hdparm  -t /dev/sda
  
  /dev/sda:
  Timing buffered disk reads:   56 MB in  3.04 seconds =  18.40 MB/sec

• The CPU/chipset/RAM/netw are nice enough to run things like rtorrent/mlnet and serve NFS.
  This is top output at the alix box whilst doing a tar cf - /mnt/Fotos/ > /dev/null (~2K photos, ~3MB each) from a LAN NFS client:
  

  top - 20:51:47 up 18 days, 22:41,  1 user,  load average: 5.65, 2.39, 0.90
  Tasks:  60 total,   1 running,  58 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
  Cpu(s):  4.0%us, 23.1%sy,  0.0%ni,  8.9%id, 31.7%wa, 21.5%hi, 10.9%si,  0.0%st
  Mem:    256860k total,   252860k used,     4000k free,      604k buffers
  Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   197128k cached
  
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                     
  30635 p2p       20   0 57232  36m 5196 S  9.2 14.4   3:00.93 mlnet                       
  11028 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  4.0  0.0   0:06.09 nfsd                        
  11030 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  4.0  0.0   0:08.98 nfsd                        
  11024 root      20   0     0    0    0 D  3.6  0.0   0:06.20 nfsd                        
  11025 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  3.6  0.0   0:06.21 nfsd                        
  11027 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  3.6  0.0   0:06.16 nfsd                        
  11026 root      20   0     0    0    0 D  3.3  0.0   0:06.06 nfsd                        
  11029 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  3.3  0.0   0:06.11 nfsd                        
  11031 root      20   0     0    0    0 D  3.3  0.0   0:06.84 nfsd                        
  30349 root      15  -5     0    0    0 D  2.6  0.0   0:05.58 usb-storage                 
  3 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  1.6  0.0   3:44.10 ksoftirqd/0                 
  88 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  1.0  0.0   2:55.14 kswapd0




• for above, iftop shows >70Mbit/s, ++enough to do a remote DVD toasting session :)
  
• a full-steam-ahead rtorrent download at 1.5MBytes/sec makes it use ~25% CPU.
  

Previously I had a conventional , fanfull, noisy, old desktop (P4 1.5Ghz) for doing 24x7 stuff @home, as you can imagine it won't be missed =)