After two months without working with UNIX I'm already missing it, and I'm looking for a project to have fun at home and remain technical -- all I do at work is using Word and Excel, and it's starting to make me crazy.
After accumulating them for over 20 years, I recently gave or threw away most of my computer parts (which included two vintage 5 1/4 drives, what a shame). The only PCs remaining are various laptops which are used by my family. I also have a rock solid m0n0wall appliance hidden in my utility room, and I don't want to zap it right away because all my network depends on it.
Those who know me well are aware that I've had a personal fascination for years with NTP. Being a licenced ham operator, building a public stratum-1 server synchronized to CHU using Linux's CHU driver would have been a kickass project to undertake 10 years years ago, with the satisfaction later down the road of contributing to the NTP pool when it became mainstream. However, owning a fixed IP address is costly, not counting bandwidth, and limiting the usefulness of a time server to my own internal network wouldn't give me much. And what's the purpose of using CHU or WWVB when you can sync using a GPS anyway; the only situation I can think of is if you can't have a clear path to a satellite, or need a cheap solution to extract the time from a reliable source. That's the premise those nice radio clocks that set their time automatically are built on.
My second fascination is with embedded devices. They don't consume much power, they're small and fun to work with. The cheapest way to own one to play with would logically be to buy a WRT54GL and flash it with a third party power-user firmware such as OpenWRT. However, the WRT54GL is based on old technology (2002), and thus fairly expensive for what you get. To add basics such as a serial port, you need to crack open the case and solder wires. Fixed storage is limited to 4Mb, that's not a lot of space in 2010 numbers. Bottom line, using the WRT54GL for a homebrew project can get expensive and cumbersome quickly, and paying big bucks for an underpowered device doesn't excite me much. Thus, I'm almost ready to purchase an ALIX 2d13. It's around double the price of a WRT54GL when you count shipping, a case and a CF card. But but it packs a LOT more power and expandability and this embedded device should be able to offer enough power to last 10 years.
One thing I was thinking about is to combine both by adding a soundcard (miniPCI or USB) to the ALIX board, plugging in a shortwave radio, and building a homemade CHU-compatible NTP time server. And why not try WWVB as a "part two". It could have been used in areas where satellite is not accessible. But I quickly found out I wouldn't have been the first one to think of this -- Meinberg already has one. Their only drawback is that it's fixed to one station (they're German, so of course they offer one synced to DCF77). But once your choice is made, you can't change it.
So back to square one. I won't invest tons of money to recreate what has already been done. And this is where I'm at, as of today, with my research on embedded x86 devices.
I think I'll end up building a generic server on the ALIX. Some tasks such as PXE installs don't seem to be well documented on this platform, and I think that testing and documenting a PXE environment could be of benefit to whoever has a bunch of these to flash. We'll see.
Take care
O.
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