Building a cheap ssh box.

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spectre
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Building a cheap ssh box.

Post by spectre » Sun Nov 28, 2010 9:01 pm

What is the cheapest way you could make a computer just to run an ssh server. I was thinking something like a beagle board running some thumb drive linux installed on an sd card, but would you be able to maintain a good bandwidth with a weak system like that? Also could I go even cheaper?

The only thing is I dont want some cheap, noisy, scrap computer running in my living room so any ideas besides that are greatly appreciated.

Also any suggestions for lightweight distros?

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Cool_Fire
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Re: Building a cheap ssh box.

Post by Cool_Fire » Tue Nov 30, 2010 3:42 pm

Honestly, anything that will support a 10 mbit ethernet card can probably outpace your internet connection. (Depending on what your connection speed is of course.)
But even your grandmothers 20 year old PC with some 100 mhz Pentium chip in it is going to have enough power to do 100 mbit in most cases.

As for the operating system, again just about any flavor of Unix is going to work just fine. A light Linux distro, or even a floppy-sized distro is going to be enough. A NetBSD install might be a good way to go for such a machine.
"The minimal configuration for a NetBSD/i386 system requires 4M of RAM and about 40M of disk space. For a full installation (including source and X11), at least 8M of RAM and 200M of disk space are recommended."
source: http://www.netbsd.org/ports/i386/hardware.html

So in short: Yes, you can run it off a beagle board, but that would still be overkill for your use. You can get away with A LOT cheaper, probably free.
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