This is the third article on my mission to build a Web Application Server for my home needs. The two first articles can be found here “Lets build a WAS” and ‘“WAS” assembly, part one‘.
My assembling was abruptly halted last week when i realized that the motherboard would not fit into the casing i had bought. Well i decided to most likely build a HTPC of that casing and power supply later. So how to proceed? The only way forward would be to get a new casing. After some research i settled with a 80W Morex T3500 a “small” casing with a fanless power supply. Approximately 750 SEK. (Actually a bit cheaper than the original casing but not as small 🙁 )
New bigger casing
Lets try to finish this computer building and get on to the more interesting parts.
Inside new casing
Not a lot of room inside there either. Interestingly the hard drive and the optical unit is located in a space underneath the main compartment. I see no reason to put in a DVD or Blu-ray player into any computer, installing is so much easier with USB media these days and i wont play any movies on this unit, so i left that out.
New casing with SSD mounted
Adding the motherboard after some serious “precision engineering” 🙂
New casing all parts mounted
To wrap it all up, adding the lid!
All done!
Then to get started i need a base operating system on the unit. My default choice would of course have been Debian. But since Debian Squeeze starting to get slightly old i got a bit nervous on how it would play with the Intel Sandy Bridge CPU. The kernel in Squeeze seems to be something like 2.6.32. Not being adventurous enough to run testing i actually opted to run Ubuntu Server edition.
The installation was very painless. I built a USB installer from the ISO-file for the 64 bit Ubuntu Server. Booted that and selected to install SSH-server and a LAMP stack. (Done in under 15 minutes!)
I now have a functional machine to start playing with! My main goals now are to get a solution providing (web-)mail, (shared) calendars and shared contacts. These services shall be available via browser, tablet/smart phone, and fat clients like Thunderbird or Evolution.