The Asus Eee Box

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Last week, I had the urge to go green - retire an old PC that runs a 300-350watt PSU and replace it with the Asus Eee Box that runs on an average of 20watts. Now, it may not seem that much but I am hoping that my electricity bill will be lowered a bit considering that the PC is often used as a file/media server (transferring stuff from the internet and within the local network) for 24 hours, 3-4 times a week.

This little critter comes with Windows XP Home, which is not ideal in a non-Windows home network (we run Macs and Linux here). The Asus Eee Box will not be the exception so Windows XP was deleted and replaced with Ubuntu 8.10. Installation was via a USB thumbdrive since the Eee Box does not come with an optical drive BUT it was not that difficult. Just use unetbootin and that is all there is to it.

Configuring it is a tad more complicated considering that I wanted it to work flawlessly on the network and integrate with our Macs. Configuring Avahi, Samba and VNC was quick tricky. On its own, Samba was easy to configure. VNC was easy to install and use but making it appear on a Mac's Finder and work, took a little bit time of experimentation.

Eventually, however, everything fell into place. VNC was setup using the built-in vinoserver of Ubuntu 8.10 with encryption turned off. Yes, since it is only within a local network that is not directly accessible so security is not as critical - besides, I can always tunnel it thru an SSH connection. Anyway, opening up the port on the firewall immediately made the VNC service visible on my Macbook's Finder. Selecting it and clicking on Screen Sharing and boom! VNC works!

Samba was configured to allow Guest access on a particular shared directory. Nothing critical on it but media files that get transferred from one Mac to the other. Whilst I can connect to it via smb:///, it is easier if it is always available on the Finder. To do this, I needed to enable Bonjour/Zeroconf via the Avahi server. This seemed to be simple - just enable, create samba.service on /etc/avahi/services and re-start avahi-daemon. Unfortunately, it was not that simple. True, Finder can see the shared directory but it won't mount it. Tried tweaking the samba.service file with everything I can throw at it but no luck. UNTIL I tweaked the Avahi configuration - just enabled IPv6 and had AAAA and A broadcasts on both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Now everything works.

So, the Eee Box can now be a headless file/media server. Configuring it remotely via SSH, transferring files to and from it both via SFTP and Samba and accessing the desktop via Screen Sharing/VNC. At 20-60watts vs 300-350watts, savings is definitely expected. We will see in a month.

[image courtesy of Asus.com]