> Small servers
With Benoit Dolez, we've been working hard at designing very small servers solutions under the name Ant Computing. The goal was to achieve a very high density while reducing power consumption and TCO, to provide cheap multi-service hosting. Now this may seem a bit "classic", but this was in 2000, and not so common at this time. Our site has even been Slashdotted ! Now the blade racks have beaten us. But fortunately, it's easy now to find very small servers, like the fantastic Linksys NSLU2 I like to play with.
> Embedded systems
I've always liked stuffing Linux everywhere, and most particularly into small and powerful devices. I bought a Linksys NSLU2 only to disassemble it and hack it for fun. There are photos here. I've not spent much time on it, but it really is a fantastic platform for Linux. I've also played with a WRT54GS which is good too, but not as much. I've recently bought PC Engines ALIX motherboards, and started hacking on them a little bit. They're pretty cool devices which make me forget the NSLU2. I explain here how to setup up a very simple UPS for those boards (with schematics and photos).
> Security
I created EZRouter, a floppy-disk based iptables firewall. It is in a some ways Formilux's ancestor, has been used as a temporary replacement on broken hardware at several customers's, and has been used a lot in benchmarking because of its easy setup. It's not maintained anymore, but could still prove useful on supported hardware. When I was still a student, I also developped Genovex, a utility to test and potentially exploit buffer overflow bugs on x86. I've used it a lot on my own programs to ensure they cannot be exploited.
> Electronics experimentation
When I have time (ie: mostly never), I sometimes like to experiment a bit with my limited skills in electronics design. Toys such as Tesla coils are very fun to play with, but unfortunately, they don't play nicely with computers.
> Various links
- http://www.ant-computing.com/ : Build your own 1U server !
> Contacts
- Contact me :
Willy TARREAU