Arch Linux

banana989

Member

Registered: 2004-06-03

Posts: 60

Old Computer- Lightweight Server

Hey guys, I have an old P3 computer with 256MB of RAM. I am thinking about hooking it up to act as a simple samba fileserver. Do you have any suggestions to cut down the amount of daemons / services that I run to keep the footprint of Arch really low? I will probably only use it for torrents, ssh, file serving, and maybe one day run lighttp. I am open to any and all suggestions.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Old Computer- Lightweight Server

With Arch, you don't have to cut things down - just start with a base install, and add only what you need, in this case bittorrent (or whatever your preferred torrent app is), openssh, samba and lighttpd. You'll probably find a few other daemons will be pulled in as dependencies, but you have complete control over what runs and what doesn't in the DAEMONS array in /etc/rc.conf.

jerem

Member

From: France

Registered: 2005-01-15

Posts: 310

Re: Old Computer- Lightweight Server

If memory footprint is something you are concerned about, I suggest using xinetd.

It calls the daemons you choose only when needed, thus reducing the memory load.

The only drawback is a small overhead, considering services response time.