[ale] SATA PCI cards

[Alex Carver]

On 12/5/2013 02:40, Jim Lynch wrote:
> On 12/04/2013 05:34 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
>> the Cubieboard being interesting but the NUCs run unmodified OSes which
>> means less work (in theory) to keep updated.
> I don't understand this statement.  My cubieboard runs Debian Wheezy
> (various flavors of Fedora and Ubuntu are also available).  If I ssh to
> this system and didn't know what I was connected to I wouldn't know it
> wasn't a desktop or laptop.  Apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade,
> apt-get install xyz work just fine.  What on a cubieboard do you think
> has to be different to keep updated?  I'd be glad to open a ssh port to
> my cubieboard and give you a login if you want to test it.

I say it based on https://wiki.debian.org/CubieBoard (and the links on
the page) which just documents the various juggling to get Debian
installed.  I'm not saying it's impossible but for something like my
mail server I don't want to spend as much time trying to keep things
updated.  For example, rebuilding kernel images, etc. instead of just
downloading the patched kernel from the apt repository and rebooting or
trying to figure out how to get the system to run with an HDD instead of
the SD card since it does a lot of writing that would burn the card.

I have no problems with using a Cubie for the SSH endpoint, I'm sure it
would work just fine the same way my OpenWRT Meraki does.  In fact I
probably would use the Cubie as the endpoint since there would be no
moving parts (just the SD card and maybe a USB stick for other
infrequently written data) but the mail server I want to more or less
"just work".