I mentioned trying to turn an aging netbook into a kind of minimal home server about a month ago. This marks the end of that particular experiment.
The power management on the netbook is dreadful and to feel the heat radiating off of the machine under no load is worrying. I can see real appeal in the single-board computing fad if only for the air-cooling and power consumption. Whatever fans have been mounted in the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 are simply insufficient for continued use.
After a month or so of negligible usage and several reboots, the machine has
started to drag on some of the simplest requests (basically anything involving
sudo). Curiously, the ssh agent kept working like a champ and allowed me to
repeatedly log-in and try and solve my issues before I gave up and power cycled
the machine.
One thing the experience has made me acutely aware of a need for better
back-ups. I probably don't require an always on system, but I should really work
out how I plan to back things up. Maybe I'll get an external drive and rsync
on a crontab, I don't think I'm ready for a fully "cloud-based" system yet.
Now I have to figure out what to do with old hardware that I know has basically zero usefulness.