The LAMP Experience
Some months back, I was on the lookout for a cheap NAS (network attached storage). The idea was that it would be cheaper than buying a second system, and if I used a NAS instead of just adding a hard disk to my PC, I should be able to switch off my PC sometimes, and not worry about shared files being inaccessible. Plus, I just wanted to play with a new gadget.
I had two choices at that time: Planex NAS-01G or Kuro-Box (a.k.a. Kurobox, KuroBox, Kuro Box…). The Kuro-Box was about SGD40 more expensive, but it was essentially a Linux box, and highly “hackable”. The Planex NAS-01G is also a Linux box, but it is meant to work out-of-the-box, and has limited “hack-ability”.
The previous semester, I had taken an Operating Systems module, where I was exposed to the Linux environment, more specifically, Fedora Core. It wasn’t much, just enough to kick start me to explore Linux further. Thus I took the plunge and went with the Kuro-Box.
I followed the guide on the Kurobox wiki, and got my Kuro-Box up and running with Debian. Next, it was getting familiarised with apt (Fedora Core used yum). I started setting up the various services on my Kuro-Box – Samba, sshd, FTP. Webmin helped a lot as well, when it came to configuring the services. Though I still prefer SWAT for Samba configuration. Once the basics were set up, I decided to go for it and set up AMP – Apache 2, MySQL 5 and PHP 5, pretty heavy services for a tiny 266MHz box with 128MB of RAM. But the good news? Everything went well, though I hardly used the web server.
This screenshot was taken about a week ago, just before I needed to reboot the box after messing around with something and causing segmentation faults everywhere. Yes. Segfaults. Those are something that really irk me about Linux.
Recently my Kuro-Box reverted back to the old 2.4 kernel again, and apparently I’ll need to re-setup the box to put the 2.6 kernel back. Sigh.