Wednesday, 3 February, 2010
Effective Usage: How To Use An Old EeePC As A Wuala Trading Server
This post is written by guest blogger M.A. Uwe Hauck who is 42 years old and living in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany. Uwe has been working with computers since he was 16 years old and is now a Computer Scientist working for a IT Service provider of a financial institute. He is active in several open source communities and expecially trying to evangelize as many people as possible to use Linux and of course Wuala as their primary online storage system. He is happily married and father of three kids.
There was this old EeePC 900a in my closet. In fact it still worked fine, just the mousebuttons were broken. So I decided to set up this device as a dedicated EeePC Trading Server. But to make it really convenient I decided I wanted to administer the whole thing while on the road, which in my case means, from another EeePC online via UMTS or from my Android Smartphone.
Setting up the server itself was rather simple. I used a standard Ubuntu installation and just installed the standard Wuala Client and added the machine to my WLan Network (and yes, of course opening the necessary ports for real exchange). But wait. I wanted it to be reachable through the internet. That was the moment when my AVM Fritzbox came in handy.
The AVM Fritzbox has an option to always post the new IP-address after disconnecting from the net to special dynamic dns services. In my case it was DynDNS which I set up in the Fritzbox to automatically reconnect my EeePC with the internet. Next step. Open the ports for ssh (22) and vnc (5900 and 5901). Since I also wanted to run a Mediawiki and a JSPWiki on that little machine, I opened the ports 8080 and 80 for web access. First tests showed me that the setup was fine. So here we go, I have a low power web server (consumes about 11 Watt) sitting under my desk which is always on and serves Wuala 32GByte of space through a plugged in SD Card.
I also set up the rest of our PC equipment (3 more netbooks and two notebooks) to use Wuala for data exchange and backup purposes. I have earned about 70GByte of online space by now. And yes, to support the Wuala idea I also bought 10GByte of non sharing web space.
I simply love the idea of trading space and recommend it to all my customers.
There was this old EeePC 900a in my closet. In fact it still worked fine, just the mousebuttons were broken. So I decided to set up this device as a dedicated EeePC Trading Server. But to make it really convenient I decided I wanted to administer the whole thing while on the road, which in my case means, from another EeePC online via UMTS or from my Android Smartphone.Setting up the server itself was rather simple. I used a standard Ubuntu installation and just installed the standard Wuala Client and added the machine to my WLan Network (and yes, of course opening the necessary ports for real exchange). But wait. I wanted it to be reachable through the internet. That was the moment when my AVM Fritzbox came in handy.
The AVM Fritzbox has an option to always post the new IP-address after disconnecting from the net to special dynamic dns services. In my case it was DynDNS which I set up in the Fritzbox to automatically reconnect my EeePC with the internet. Next step. Open the ports for ssh (22) and vnc (5900 and 5901). Since I also wanted to run a Mediawiki and a JSPWiki on that little machine, I opened the ports 8080 and 80 for web access. First tests showed me that the setup was fine. So here we go, I have a low power web server (consumes about 11 Watt) sitting under my desk which is always on and serves Wuala 32GByte of space through a plugged in SD Card.
I also set up the rest of our PC equipment (3 more netbooks and two notebooks) to use Wuala for data exchange and backup purposes. I have earned about 70GByte of online space by now. And yes, to support the Wuala idea I also bought 10GByte of non sharing web space.
I simply love the idea of trading space and recommend it to all my customers.
