Putting my old 7" eeePc to good use as an internet-accessable NAS box.
Posted by Paul McConnon
I was going to put my old eeepc on Ebay as I’d bought a new Advent 4213 netbook, with a more useful sized screen and built in 3G. I expected to get about a hundred quid for it.
I hated selling it though, but couldn’t think of a good use for it. I toyed with the idea of using it as a music player in another room, but my house isn’t big enough for this to make sense. I forced myself to admit that I was in a “solution looking for a problem” kinda situation.
Before I got my arse in gear and actually put the thing on Ebay, I had cause to stop using my mac mini as an always-on file-server. I needed to keep my files available on a machine on the network. I didn’t want to leave my main ‘workhorse’ PC on all the time as it’s a dual-core P4, from back when Ghz meant more than watts/hour as a measure of your cpu, and so is a noisy old bugger. Not to mention the power it would use (I’d got burned a few years ago with huge bills from leaving PC’s on all the time, and have since tried to minimise computer drain on power). I didn’t want to fork out for a NAS, although I’m sure that it would have done the trick, being low power and I’d hope, quiet.
Then it stuck me, I had the perfect low power, silent computer, perfect for serving files and I was about to get rid of it!
I switched on the eeepc, which hadn’t been turned on in months, it booted up quickly and all was well. I was actually surprised at how snappy it felt, much snappier than the newer Advent netbook which has a slower (but dual core) Atom processor. It’s got a small (4Gb) solid state internal drive, but had no other storage built-in. This is enough for the OS (Ubuntu) and some tunes and documents but not much more.
I took the Lacie USB drive from the mac mini and connected it to the eeepc, right-clicked the folders on the mounted drive and shared them as windows (samba) shares. It was a painless one-click operation. Now I can connect to my photos, movies and music from the original mac running FrontRow, my Vista laptop and my Ubuntu linux desktop. I then installed SSH and opened the firewall so that I have secure access to my files from anywhere on the internet.
I did have to run a script in order to get Ubuntu to tell the USB drive to switch to low power when it wasn’t being used, but it’s all working perfectly now, sitting quietly in the corner serving my files.
‘Happy Days’ as the man says :)
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