Linux – Building a build server on an Atom Mini-ITX PC

As Nic said, how much data do you need?

For myself, every file I've ever created (going back 20 years, although the old old ones are really small), most of my wife's files (most because she's switched PCs a few times and there are a few odds and ends on older hard drives), every picture we've taken or scanned, and most of our family videos (not the raw files straight from the camera, but lots of "the best" clips) all fit on a 320GB hard disk. It'll take at least 3 years before I get to 500GB.

So I just have 4 copies of everything on external hard drives. One drive stays at home, one small one goes with me, one stays at an office, the last one moves around. I use SecondCopy to back up the files from my laptop to the external drives and I do a backup to at least one of the external drives any time I change more than a couple files. Hard drives are cheap enough that when I need bigger ones, it won't cost much, and I'll put aside at least a couple of the 320s to keep forever.

I'm seriously considering (since my laptop hard drive is almost full) getting rid of the "master" copy of all my stuff that's on my laptop and just treating two of the hard drives as my carry-around storage, and the other two as stationary backups.

KVM and possibly the other solutions, allow you to present an entire block device to the guest OS. You could, for example, set up a dedicated LVM partition (or even complete disk drive) on the host system for your file server files, and present that to your file-server virtual machine as a hard drive mounted at /srv, for example.

That way you haven't got one huge file for your server - just a partition on the host's disks. That would take care of the files residing on the host but being served by the virtual file server to your network.

I've got a very similar setup, also on Ubuntu 9.10 with KVM, where I've got an LDAP directory and 6 virtual servers running atop 2 physical servers. I was torn with the same situation as yourself - do I set up 2 virtual machines to host the LDAP, or run it on the physical machines? My answer was because the physical machines also need access to LDAP, I'll host it on the physical boxes. If I'd done it the other way around, and the virtual LDAP server failed, the physical servers wouldn't be able to use it. But if the physical server fails, the virtual machines will have failed also so it doesn't matter that LDAP isn't working!

In my setup, the whole virtual machines are on LVM partitions at the host level, because they're replicated between the 2 physical machines using DRBD, so if one physical box dies, they can be bought up quickly on the other. The complete LVM partition is presented to the VM as a SCSI hard drive, and the VM then partitions that "hard drive" also using LVM.