As alluded to elsewhere, I ordered a Raspberry Pi! I'm hoping to use it as a home server and perhaps experiment with some automation. Here is a picture of our two new computers running side by side.


Even though you know it's a miniature computer when you order it, it's amazing how tiny it is when you take it out of the box - it's a computer that would have been regarded as a ninja PC just nine or ten years ago on a circuit board the size of a box of chewing gum. It runs off a micro-USB cable - fortunately I had one in the form of my Windows phone charger.

I work a lot with Linux at work, but I hadn't set a Unix-based system up from first principles before and was fairly daunted by the prospect. They provide you with a good amount of assistance, though - you download an image of the OS on to an SD card (the default is a customized version of Debian) and then it does most of the basic setup for you. Wireless networking was the one major hurdle to get over, because you have to find a compatible USB dongle or be prepared to spend ages going through the Linux drivers - fortunately, by coincidence, the local hardware shop had one of the models that was said to work straight out of the box, a D-Link DWA-131.

Of course, "out of the box" has a very different definition on Linux from the one it has on Windows, and I was confused by the number of options and utilities for setting it up, especially as I was trying to get it to connect to our antiquated WEP network with a space in its SSID. On the day I got it I didn't have much luck with the instructions for setting up the /etc/network/interfaces file, but I ran some command line iwconfig things that I copied from the Internet and that seemed happy enough.

To get it to connect on startup - as well as feel that I was using a middleman that knew what he was doing - I downloaded the wicd tool, and that was all very impressive, but it produced a connection that was inexplicably down about half the time - it would be absolutely fine for a while, then would drop all connections and wouldn't respond to ping for five minutes, then continue as if nothing had happened. I imagine there must have been some sort of conflict with another networking service there - so I uninstalled that and had another go of the /etc/network/interfaces file, where I realized that my mistake was removing the "auto wlan0" line, believing it to mean "attempt to automatically set up this device" and not "connect this device on startup".

So I installed a lightweight HTTP server, nginx (which is pronounced "llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch") and wrote a little monitoring page to verify that I could leave it running uninterrupted.


Like any other heartbeat monitoring page, this prints a randomly-oriented banana every time it finds that the service is still reachable. Through this (including a couple of negative tests where I turned the server off and then on again), it looks - so far - like the connection is stable.

The next step, I think, will be to install PHP!