Mobile server development can be tricky, or do I mean mobile development for servers? A few weeks ago it would have been the latter however thanks to the superb little Dell Mini 9 I can now deliver both whilst simultaneously sipping a nice latte in the Cafe “Tous les Jours” across the street

Presently ensconced as I am for a couple of months in the contemporary and alluring area of Prenzlauer Berg in the new East of Berlin my initial idea was to pull server development out of VMWare Fusion on the increasingly tired MacBook Air over to some real hardware I could leave powered up 24/7 in the background *doing stuff*, the plan involved a recently purchased Mac Mini G4 which I intended to use headless as the Ubuntu Server box, the less mirrored 9.04 PPC version was readily available so I loaded it up before I came, it was impressively quick too and after a year of patience with struggling VM instances I was really looking forward to getting down to business with it.

Anyway, as is the case with my life over the past two years things didn’t pan out as expected, predominantly down to the lack of a hard-wired internet connection in the apartment, there’s Wi-Fi sporadically drifting in and out but with a flaky up and down signal varying anywhere between 0.3 and 1MB things weren’t that conducive from the start, yes the Mac Mini has Wi-Fi but with no monitor and a text based server install of 9.04 sat on it there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting that fired up, OK then, time to create a plan B.

Plan B came in the shape of a refurb Dell Mini 9 off eBay and a view to utilise the internal Wi-Fi network infrastructure, however as this is the Rich B of today once again things didn’t go exactly as I hoped. The poor link to the outside world I could have coped with however when the Mini 9 arrived the discovered lack of any internal routing whatsoever around the already lacking network meant there was no Webmin, no local Apache browsing, not even any SSH, and as for syncing my wireless iPod Touch apps, forget it, not ideal, my I.T can’t communicate, snookered again.

Internet connectivity is now booked for this Thursday and even though I’ve lost almost three weeks I’ve managed to occupy myself and I’m now just hoping it comes together, what work I could do with the Mini has actually being quite upbeat, albeit just not “server” orientated.

Firstly I stuck full blown 9.04 on it so I could further install the server tools (there’s no tasksel option from the 8.04 netbook remix), this was quite straightforward and just involved a bit of Unetbootin to my spare USB pen drive. Once fired up I was super impressed to find out all the essentials worked straight off the bat and after a few codec tweaks plus installs of Twitux, Thunderbird, Skype & VLC I began to realise what a great little unit it was becoming, as such I took it for an afternoon out across the road to “Tous les Jours” for some latte drinking and review writing, 3+ hours later I returned to the apartment with a reported 1 hour battery life still backed up, very impressive to say the least, especially as I’d had the W-Fi on continually sucking away at their ego bashing 3.5MB free connection, were I using the MacBook Air I’d have had to go back for a re-charge and long missed the finalising session and leisurely cup of afternoon Earl Grey.

I’ve since stuck DropBox on the little beast (an idea I had during the 1st latte) so I can keep things in sync with the Air and although the 9 only comes with a potentially limiting 8GB SSD (of which it reported 3.5GB free btw) I just pointed things at my 64GB SpaceLoopXL pendrive, I could use a card in the SD slot of course but I just don’t have one and don’t really see any need, the SpaceLoop is fine.

So, that’s it for now, at least it’s primed and ready for Thursday and I have no doubt it’s going to be gem for server dev also, so much so it’s all really got me thinking about increased potential for SSD storage as an option for servers. SSD’s are quiet, energy efficient, super quick and I’m wondering how long it will be until the first fully SSD’d server room get’s exposure and how much reported air con resource it will save as a result of losing all those mechanical spinning monsters? The Mini 9 also runs Vuze and I’ve noted after it sitting there all night working away with the lid shut come morning when re-opened there’s nothing heated or untoward going on and it’s as cool as it was when I said goodnight, figuratively (of course), contrary to what people may think I don’t talk to my computers (although I will take them for a latte if they’ve been good).