homecomputerlab

I finally got fed up of the noise coming from our loft this weekend and decided to put my Raspberry Pi to better use after the initial excitement from the Raspberry Pi had cooled off and it had been sitting unused for quite awhile. My old trusty 1U VIA EPIA5000 web server had served me well, but was starting to get a little noisy, the PSU fan was not sounding good and I can only assume this was due to it having been hosted in my dusty loft for the past few years which really isn’t the best environment for a server to be running 24×7. The migration across to the Raspberry pi was a really simple one, backup the webroot directory and mysql db and scp across to the pi. Job done. Now all is blissfully silent downstairs in the house once more. Currently my pi is running a minimal Debian wheezy image I came across here http://www.linuxsystems.it/2012/06/debian-wheezy-raspberry-pi-minimal-image/ which works a treat using ~20MB Ram after a reboot. I have however noticed that web pages do now seem to load a little bit slower that on my old web server, especially when loading image files. I’m still running Apache and mysql, but may investigate migrating across to lighttpd and SQLite in the near future to try and speed things up a bit. All in all though I’m pretty happy with the pi running as my new web server and also happy that I’ve put it to better use. This of course now means that I will need to order a 2nd Raspberry pi, at £25 it doesn’t really matter if I don’t get the time to play with it all that much and it just sits in the corner, at the very least I will have a ‘hot spare’ web server. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the old web server?