I've been having some fun sorting out some cool new tech. for my house. I've been looking for something to replace the large tower box I've got running my file/print & website for a while. Mainly so I can separate them and not be hosting any extneral services on the same machine as I'm hosting internal services.
So I've been looking for small, quiet, cheap Linux boxes to use for a webserver and I came across the Buffalo Linkstation Pro. It only costs 99 pounds in the UK and is designed as a NAS device, however in common with most of these kinds of devices, it's really a small ARM-based computer running Linux. So following a quick trip to the excellent Linkstation wiki some downloading and following of instructions to re-flash the device, I've now got a debian Linux server with 128MB RAM and a 250GB hard drive all for under a hundred quid!!
The other thing I set-up for the first time the other night was tor, mainly to see how easy or difficult it would be. the answer is (on Fedora Core 6 at least) pretty easy, two package installs and a couple of edits to config files and I'm surfing anonymously. It's a bit slow but apart from that seems to do what it says on the tin. Very handy to test source IP address restrictions if you're using them.
