For the past few months I’ve fought with various issues on my new DHCP/DNS/SMB/HTTP server. I expected a fight, it’s a 100Mhz ARM processor with no monitor, keyboard, mouse, or internal hard drive.

It’s a SLUG.

At first, I was using full Debian install which worked really well. It worked so well that I kept adding stuff that I wanted it to do to it until the load on boot was near 6 constantly and I couldn’t get bash to load after ssh’ing to it. It was then that I realized that I shouldn’t run MySQL, Apache, PHP, Bind, Exim, sshd, Samba, and Bittorrent on a computer slower (barely) than the one I had ten years ago.

I redid it with SlugOS and have been running tiny packages: thttpd, dnsmasq, that sort of thing. It runs OK but the load is never under 1.0.

Break that off and it runs at the speed it was designed to run - twice as fast as Linksys ships it.

This morning I used a nail clipper on the resistor and it came off very easy.

> grant@slug:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : XScale-IXP42x Family rev 1 (v5b) BogoMIPS : 266.24

I’ve got the SLUG attached to a 500GB IDE drive in a USB enclosure, serving mp3’s to itunes, movies to the modded xbox, and acting as a general file repository for backups, and (http://home.jokerbone.com/) a web server. The external drive has very quiet fans, the SLUG has none.