As a build bot? What are you building?

For me, a build bot has to be ultra powerful. The thing I'm usually building has 40k+ files and the linker dies unless I have more than 4gig of ram. This VIA or a Raspberry PI just isn't going to cut it as a build bot.

Of course there are tons of other uses.

> As a build bot? What are you building?

My library upb (https://github.com/haberman/upb/wiki). It is ~5k LoC and builds in 10 seconds on x86. 4gig of RAM is entirely unnecessary. It pays to be small. :)

I'm using a beaglebone running Ubuntu, it's a brilliant little box, cost £55.

There's the pandaboard too, which is more powerful with hdmi output

Where on earth do you get a beaglebone for £55? Haven't seen it for < £70.

Does it reliably boot headless? If it does I'll order one before the ink dries on this comment.

Yes, it's been very reliable for me. It ships with angstrom Linux, but it's trivial to install Ubuntu.

I've got it hosted in a collocation rack now, so it had better stay reliable :-)

I've written a short blog post about it http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/956/my-60-arm-server

Awesome, I'm totally getting one, thanks! Also appreciate learning about nmon, which looks nifty.

(Still do wish I could jailbreak my AppleTV though. That is one sexy piece of hardware.)

Out of interest, what does it cost to host one of these in a colo rack? I was thinking about it as an alternative to my VPS.

(Apologies if you said this in blog post already, it's currently unavailable.)

Used Google cache to read the blog. This is what was written in the blog:

So, now it’s time to take it to the next level – I’ve paid for the beaglebone to go into a colocation rack in Telehouse North, with a friendly colocation company called Jump Networks who were happy to help out with the experiment, and who only charge for £50 + VAT for installation and a very low monthly cost for hosting the equipment, as little as £5 per month – perfect for an ARM server.

Sorry about that, the blog is hosted on linode, who had scheduled a reboot for tonight, which turned into a 2 hour outage...

The colo I picked only charges for electricity and excess bandwidth, which is why I picked them.

It cost £50 to install, and £12 a year in hosting costs for electricity and bandwidth, but the host I'm using says they'll have to introduce a minimum charge of about £5 per month if lots of people start doing it with these micro servers.

I bought an Android set-top-box, the Flexiview FV-1, ($120ish, 1Ghz Cortex A8) at the end of last year and got Debian running on it.

http://projectgus.com/tag/fv-1/

I haven't run one 24/7 for more than a week or two though, so I don't really know how good it would be as a server.

What about a simple router? They costs loads less: I tried something like this here : http://simula67.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/how-to-create-a-dow...

Check out Aboriginal. It's Linux in an ARM VM specifically for compiling to an ARM target.

http://landley.net/aboriginal

Thanks for the pointer, but I'd also like to track performance numbers over time.

Isn't this a perfect use case for Raspberry Pi?

Except it doesn't have much memory, no sata/ide interface, a relatively slow CPU and a version of the ARM that isn't the same instruction set as most Android/Linux targets

You might want to look into getting an AppleTV 1. It can run OSX and most likely Ubuntu. They should be quite cheap now.

The AppleTV 1 is a decent system, but it's an x86 machine, and the author seems to want an embedded ARM box.

Oh my bad. I thought he wanted an ARM box because they're usually much cheaper.

Try TonidoPlug2. It runs debian squeeze.

I'd suggest the cheapest Dell desktop box. Or even the cheapest Dell server.

It will be a magnitude order more costly though, both in acquisition price and electricity.

Dell makes ARM machines? Do tell. I already have headless build bots for x86 (new Mac Mini) and PowerPC (old Mac Mini), which are perfect in form factor for this. I specifically want an ARM machine to add to them.

Shazam!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833704...

Its mips based though, not arm. Runs openwrt nice. I use mine as a file/print server.

Why the downvotes? I really found 3 antennas interesting..