Mike's Mathom Collection - Servers
As stated on the home page, I wanted to see if one of my spare Beaglebone Black single-board computers could cut it as an always-on server since it dissipated only about 5 W, and so in February 2014 I created the ancestor of this website, and indeed it worked very well. It was a bit limited as a high speed file server due to the 100 Mbps ethernet port. The left-hand picture shows “illuminated.duckdns.org” in action with the Beaglebone, while the right picture shows some of the system information.
But eventually I decided to upgrade, so in June 2016 I switched to an ODROID-C2. It had a significantly faster 64-bit CPU, much more memory, and a gigabit ethernet port. The only limit it had as a web server (in principle) is my cable modem connection to the Internet.
But the “principle” seems to not be the end of the story. I couldn't resist the ODROID-N2 when it came out in 2019, and it showed somewhat faster network upload speeds than the C2. So at the end of July 2019, I switched the site to the N2, and it served as an admirable workhorse for 6 years.
Just for fun, here is a picture of all three side-by-side, without their enclosures or any of the cabling . Left-to-right are the Beaglebone Black, ODROID-C2, and ODROID-N2.
However, as I'm getting older and finding myself depending more and more on the web and cloud services I have been providing myself, I decided it was time to move to an x86_64-based server. The above computers used ARM processors, and while they all provided excellent performance with low power dissipation, they all required custom kernels—whether compiled by the manufacturer or by me—and keeping them up-to-date required more effort than I'm now willing to give. Going back to x86_64 eliminates that extra work, so I can use a standard linux distribution with no fuss.
In June 2025 I made the switch to a small, passively-cooled MeLE mini-pc. It's not much bigger than the N2, and dissipates the same amount of power. While it was several times more expensive than the N2, it also has a faster processor, more memory, and more disk space, so overall a worthy replacement given that I'm using it for real life, not just for tinkering. A comparison picture of all four in their enclosures is at right—Beaglebone Black, ODROID-C2, ODROID-N2, MeLE Quieter4C. For scale, the Beaglebone and the C2 really are the size of a credit card.
The original URLs “illuminated.duckdns.org” and “flatcoats.duckdns.org” were provided by DuckDNS. The SSL security certificates for the duckdns sites were provided by Let's Encrypt. In November 2024, I moved the sites to my own domain, “gemuttlichkeit.org”, on CloudFlare, who also provide the SSL certificates. The site webserver is nginx, which until June 2025 ran on an ARM port of openSUSE Leap. (See this forum thread.) Since then, the site is running on a standard x86_64 version of Leap.
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