The Pocket Site

I work with Linux most days, and run it on pretty much all my desktops. So the a few days back I was feeling a bit jaded about doing the same old stuff and started Googling for some interesting things to do. I saw lots of posts about desktop related stuff, but not so much server side things. The goal is fun a play here… with a bit more effort I came up with the following ideas, so dust off your shell foo, I hope its useful to you as well. I’ll be linking some of the below with a few options as I discover those.

• Run Xen or some other virtualization service, its great for setting up and testing, then starting fresh with a clean install. And its nice to be able to play with different distros too.
• Build a media server – surprisingly easy to do now days, set up a headless server with nfs and samba exports for your media content, and install a streaming service such as MediaTomb or IceCast. Makes it easy to view/listen to your media from whatever location you happen to be. Keep other files there too, for example saved copies of Linux install images.
• Build a basic video security system with an inexpensive webcam and a few simple tools
• Set up an asterisk server, its amazing what sort of home automation you can do through that…
• Run your own website/blog
• Troll through a few fun Linux related sites looking for other fun ideas.

PS: Before those of you who are distro-baiters out start trolling . Windows and MacOS are cool,  I just prefer Linux for most things.

PPS: don’t forget to secure your stuff guys, it would be a shame to go to all that work, and then have it ruined by putting up a big welcome sign for random crackers to exploit. Remember this is server stuff so its expected to be exposed to the rest of the world