After setting up hardware and installing the base OS, we can now configure networking. (In the future, I hope Indie Box Project will make this a lot easier with indie-networking.) My server has two ethernet interfaces, which, surprisingly, aren’t called ethX any more, but enp3s0 and enp4s1. I guess I can live with that. The…

Okay, the test passed and the drive works fine. Now I’m largely following the Arch Linux instructions. Let’s create a single root partition: > fdisk /dev/sda … and put an ext4 filesystem on it: > mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 Oops, what is this: an error message says “/dev/sda1 is apparently in use by the system” and mkfs…

I got two brand-new 2TB drives for a RAID1 data partition. It will hold all the stuff that I don’t want to lose. For the root partition, I’m reusing a 400G drive that I own already. I’m downloading the most recent Arch Linux download from here. I’m using bit torrent, because big downloads are expensive…

My wife and I have run a server at home pretty much continuously since we came to California in 1995. I remember carrying stacks of Slackware floppy disks home from work: whatever code was needed, I downloaded it at work to a 1.44M floppy disk, and installed it when I got home. Lots of driver…