CentraLUG Notes, 8-Jan-2008, Bruce Dawson and low-power Linux machines

[Ted Roche]

Thanks to Bruce Dawson and Carol Soule for opening up their home for the 
January meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as 
usual on the first Monday of each month. Our regular haunts, the New 
Hampshire Technical Institute's Library, was closed for winter break, 
and I doubt there were many spaces left open in the state, what with 46 
presidential candidates clambering all over for those last minute votes. 
Today is primary day, so remember: vote early, vote often!

Seven attendees made it to the meeting. Bruce had taken quite some 
effort to move a lot of his network to the meeting room, and had labels 
and fact sheets for a number of devices. He had:

- and older Koolu with a 30 Gb drive and a dual head display: it's a 
Geode based machine that "feels" around 600 - 800 Mhz, with 1 Gb RAM, 
Ubuntu on the hdd, and Xfce as the desktop. While no speed demon, the 
machine takes an incredibly small amount of power to run and can serve a 
lot of useful functions from thin client to headless server. Bruce used 
the machine to ssh into:

- a LinkSys WTLS54GS, an XScale processor running at around 250 Mhz with 
32 Mb RAM and a Linux image burned into Flash. This device has a 
built-in USB port, and through a hub was running 300 Gb work of disk 
drives and a memory card reader! Speaking of storage, Bruce also had...

- a LinkSys NSLU network storage unit: a 100 Mhz Linux computer whose 
HDD had stopped working, perhaps due to stage fright), but a simple 
little low-wattage computer Bruce used in their small office as a 
network time server, NFS and Samba server. It also had a USB connection 
with outboard HDD support.

- a LinkSys WRT56G v 1.1, one of the early models: switch, router, 
wireless access point (b/g) and general purpose computer.

- an embedded "Java on a Chip" computer in DIMM form. A very rugged form 
factor, rated for use from -30 to +150 degrees Fahrenheit, Bruce is 
looking to outfit some of his farm equipment with similar devices.

- a brand-new, never taken out of the book Koolu which Bruce opened and 
we admired with appropriate "OOhs" and "Ahs!" What a bunch of hardware 
addicts!

Bruce was not the only one to bring hardware to show-and-tell.

Bill Freeman brought along a single computer-on-a-board: ARM9 processor, 
ethernet, USB, PC103 connection, serial, and individual A/D interfaces. 
He used it in a recent project and is looking at refitting it into a car 
computer.

Bill McGonigle also brought a couple of machines to show off: Iliad 
Devices provides its customers with a firewall based on BSD and pfSense 
in a very nice small-form-factor appliance-box: a Via C7 low-power 
fanless motherboard, 3 GigE network connections and lots of auxilliary 
but unused connections (sound, PS/2 mouse, etc.). Hooking two of the 
devices up using the built-in Firewire-400 connections provides a 
heartbeat and very rapid failover for high-availability firewall and 
routing. Bill's clients get great reliability and a programmable 
interface capable of all of the router functionality in You-Know-Who's 
routers at a fraction of the cost. Very impressive!

Bill McGonigle also brought what might have been the smallest and 
lowest-power of the devices that night, a Nokia N810 Internet tablet. 
What a sweet little machine: around 3" x 5", not half-an-inch thick, 
800x600 touch color screen, web browser, email client, wireless, 
bluetooth and built-in GPS. Wow.

Thanks to Bruce and Carol for their hospitality, and to Bruce for 
tearing apart his network to show us all the cool toys. Thanks to all 
for participating and bringing interesting toys to show.

Our next meeting should be at the NHTI Library, Room 146 on February 4th 
at 7pm, but keep an eye on the -announce list for official word. David 
Berube, well-known local Linux advocate, LUG activist, software 
developer and book author will be talking about Ruby on Rails; should be 
a great show! Hope to see you there.