Without open-source alternatives like Zenoss, monitoring an extensive home or small office network is cost prohibitive so it often just isn’t done.

Since I also work for Zenoss, I’m often using various versions of Zenoss on my development systems to watch the home network. But these installations are not stable and long-running. One alternative I’ve considered is to install a new Virtual Machine on my home workstation that is a Zenoss appliance, but the issue here is that my home workstation is not always completely stable. I want my Zenoss install to be stable and relatively free from interference from my other activities. A dedicated server is the answer.

Normally I have enough spare computer parts in the closet that I could cobble together a working machine, but no such luck this time. Since I was building a server from scratch, I really did not want to go and build another large machine that was power-hungry, loud or took up a lot of space. Intel has come to the rescue with the new Atom-based systems that are very low power and use the mini-ITX form factor.

I wound up choosing the Intel D945GCLF2 main-board that comes with a dual-core Intel Atom 330 already installed. I configured it with 2GB of DDR2 667 memory. I picked an Apex MI-100 case with 250W power supply for it all to live in. Since this case is passively cool the only noise in the system is the small fan on the main-board’s memory controller (the CPU is passively cooled!) and any noise from the hard drive. I did have some spare hard drives laying around, so I picked an older Western Digital 150GB Raptor to help with system speed. Total out of pocket cost since I already had the drive? $171.22 shipped from newegg.

As you can see from the relative size of the hard drive the whole system is tiny. I don’t need an optical drive so if I wanted to put another 3.5″ hard drive in the case for mirroring purposes I could easily do so. Chances are better than I’ll eventually put a low-cost solid-state drive in the system as a 16 or 32 GB size would be plenty.

I put Ubuntu server on the system and used the network-based install to get it installed so I didn’t need to put an optical drive in the system. Rather than mess around with a network boot (which is great when it works, but I never have a working server setup to host the boot files) I just put the boot image on a USB memory stick and booted the core installation from there. The only issue here was a drive number reordering problem once the system was rebooted and the memory stick removed, but that was easily fixed.

Once running the system is effectively like any other x86 based Linux server. It’s not even slow, as the 1.6 GHz dual-core Atom supplies plenty of computing power. It’s clearly not as fast as current or previous generation desktop or server chips, but for building Zenoss I don’t find it any slower than the virtual machines in Zenoss’s development VMware farm. In many ways, I like having a slower system here to use because it helps keep me mindful of not ever user has plenty of computing power to throw at our software.

I decided to run Zenoss using a source-based install, but instead of running off the trunk I picked the 2.3.x branch to start with. This branch is from the version we just released which is proving to be our best release yet. I’ll switch to new releases using the source install but avoid the trunk given the large amount of turmoil that can occur there as new features are integrated into the product.

After getting Zenoss running I let it discover my home network. As expected, it found nearly all of the devices I have (13 out of the 16). There will be some configuration to do on some of the devices to enable true monitoring, but this is a great start.