Off-Grid Multi-User System

2019-04-23 (Updated: 2020-05-23)

2020-05-23 Tracking power usage (to be detailed later) could be coupled with process accounting to allow for calculation of per user energy usage on the system. GNU Accounting Utilities provides the tools for granular tracking system usage by process and user. This could further be extended to track the power usage of each service provided by the server.

I would want to do some further research and eventual testing to see if this would have much of a performance or security impact on the server. Also, because:

“When process accounting is enabled, the kernel writes a record to the accounting file as each process on the system terminates.”

I am not sure how this will fair for tracking long running processes which for the most part don’t terminate until reboot, upgrade, etc…

2020-05-17 Some thoughts on software for the server.

Ansible setup and configuration. Can be put into version control and easily redeployed.
Git server, web interface by cgit. Should keep resource usage down. Don’t think a ticket/issue tracker would be needed — or some sort of async messaging system could take it’s place.
As mentioned below, a com like local chat system would be great.
There are many fast and lightweight web servers available, so more investigation would be required to pick a suitable one.
Possibly run a Gopher server too.

2020-05-15 Found a chat program called party that acts similar to com on SDF. party was written by the late Jan Wolter and appears to have been last updated around 2003.

I am quite fond of this style of simple, system based, multi-user chat. It is low friction and easy to just use. Because party doesn’t compile on modern POSIX systems in 2020, I may develop a simple clone using Rust.

2020-05-10 ODROID-C4 — This looks like it could be a good low powered server.

Quad-Core Cortex-A55 (2.016GHz)
4GB DDR4 Memory
eMMC Connector
1 x GbE LAN Port

ODROID-C4

2019-04-23 I’m keen to setup a multi-user computing system that is energy efficient enough to be powered by a simple off-grid solar power system. This page is just a preparatory collection of links and information that will aid the project.