As you may know, working with tight budgets can sometimes lead to very interesting solutions. The company that I work for has over 30 retail locations and several branch offices that connect back to the corporate network using point-to-point T1 or broadband connections. The connection speed is a major concern and with the demand of data and network services increases, a need for a branch office server became apparent.

One of the options that had been considered was to use a local Windows XP workstation to be a file/print server, but the restriction of a maximum of 10 concurrent connections was a significant issue. And since the company is primarily a Microsoft shop, the option of deploying Windows Server 2008 at each location would be nice… except it meant spending a lot of money on licenses alone.

The other option that I was thinking about was to load up a system with Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS and use Samba and CUPS for file and print services. The next piece was trying to choose what type of hardware to deploy as the branch office server. At first, I was looking at a small desktop model from Dell, but power consumption and physical size was a big concern. So I remembered a model that Dell was marketing as a flexible, smart desktop that would fit between a thin client and a normal desktop. The model in question is a Dell OptiPlex 160, which uses an Intel Atom processor (single or dual-core) and can take either a standard hard drive or a flash module. So I decided to get a demo unit from Dell and started the process of loading Ubuntu Server on it and documented the build process. So far, the demo unit has been working perfectly, barely gets warm under heavy load and sips power.

In the meantime, I have cleaned up the document and re-wrote it for public consumption and it is available at: http://static.closedsrc.org/articles/ubuntu-lts-optiplex160.html

Along with the new article, I decided to relocate the existing articles that I wrote for Dæmon News to a new location, http://static.closedsrc.org/articles/.