A while back, we close to filling up the partition on our desktop machine with photos, so I decided to get a second hard drive. In the end, instead of a hard drive, I decided to by the WD My Book World Edition which is a basic Linux server with a 1TB hard drive.

Here’s my notes on what I’ve done with it so far:

• Enable ssh

• Install optware

• Install some useful optware packages (e.g. cron, perl etc)

• Re-configure the system using prep_whitelight.sh

• Write script to tweet system status

• Write script to report stats to MySQL database online

• Build views to show the stats