Low footprint, high performance

The heart of my website is 'Calvin', a Gigabyte Brix A8-5545.

The micro form-factor of the Brix allows me to keep this mounted behind my TV, where I can run it both as a server and as a Media PC, there is more than enough performance in this system for full HD playback.

The system uses very little energy, and is nearly silent, though the fan can be heard during FreeBSD rebuilds and other intense operation. It is fast too, with four cores, 8Gb of memory and an internal M2 SSD for the Operating System.

FreeBSD

Software-wise, I run FreeBSD (always the latest release, fully updated) as my server Operating System.

  • FreeBSD is one of a number of Open Source, BSD style operating systems.
  • It's extremely fast, stable and secure.
  • It has the FreeBSD portage mechanism, always up to date.
  • The price, as they say, is right.. Free as in Beer.
  • And the politics are right too.. Free as in Speech.