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The network-attached storage (NAS) business is booming. Everyone needs a convenient storage pod for the gigabytes of data they accumulate, and they want to be able to access it from anywhere on the local network and the wider internet. As a result, the hardware is getting increasingly powerful. High-end NAS boxes for small businesses and large homes are moving from Arm processors to Intel’s Atom platform, and turning simple file servers into far more capable mini-machines in the process. One of these expanded NAS boxes could operate as a web server, a media transcoder, a UPnP streaming hub for your PS3 and Xbox, and even a virtual desktop. The only problem is that these boxes are expensive – and that’s before buying the hard drives.

OK, it won’t look exactly like this. And it’s unlikely to have the capacity of an actual NAS. But we reckon there’s no better use for that old netbook.

Fortunately, there’s a cheaper way. These NAS boxes aren’t the only hardware to use Intel’s Atom: it’s also used in many netbooks. These machines are often cheap, accessible and easily configurable, and they’re all well suited to the task regardless of their age. They’re energy efficient, unburdened by extra hardware, feature both wireless and wired interfaces, and are small, quiet and cool. Attach a hard drive or two to a USB port, configure the operating system and you’re ready to go. We’re going to turn one of these netbooks into a super-powered NAS using some external USB storage, a LAN connection and some install media.

Install UNR

Not all Linux-based operating systems for netbooks are equal. Linpus, as bundled with the original EeePC, is particularly ill-equipped for updates and customisation, so don’t mess around with your default install if you ever want to use your machine as a netbook again. For these reasons, and to keep your current netbook data safe, we’re going to create a NAS configuration that will sit on a USB flash drive rather than your netbook’s internal storage. This will enable you to return your netbook to normal laptop duties whenever the need arises by simply removing the USB stick. However, you could omit the USB flash drive requirement and just install a new operating system over the old one if you prefer.

Start by installing an appropriate distro. UNR is hard to beat in this context, although you might choose a non-graphical version for your NAS.

There are two popular netbook distributions that we could easily shoehorn into NAS operating systems. The first is Intel’s Moblin, a finely tuned version of Linux that makes good use of a netbook’s limited capabilities. The only problem is that it’s not that easy to modify with simple packages. That leaves us with Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), a special version of its Ubuntu operating system tailored for netbook hardware and screen sizes. The great advantage that UNR has over Moblin is that it has access to the massive library of packages that are available to any Ubuntu user, so installing and configuring these packages is an identical process on both systems.

To install UNR on your netbook, you need to get hold of an ISO of the latest release (see www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook). You then have two options. If you’ve got a Windows machine handy, burn the ISO to a disc and run the usb-creator.exe application from it. This will automatically install the distribution onto a USB stick without any further hassle. The second option requires a machine running Ubuntu. Use the Synaptic package manager to download and install a package called usb-creator. After this is done, run USB Startup Disk Creator from the Launch menu. In the top panel of the window that appears, click on the ‘Other’ button and point the file requester in the direction of your UNR ISO. In the lower panel, make sure you select your inserted USB device and click on ‘Format’. Get the wrong device and you’ll lose any data it contains, so be careful.

The end result of both methods is that you’ll have UNR installed on a USB stick. You can now boot into this operating system by simply inserting the USB stick into a spare port on your netbook and rebooting. When the UNR desktop appears, you’re ready to reconfigure.

Add connections

Your netbook is going to need to be connected to your LAN, either through a wireless router or a wired one. The connection is configured through the Connection icon in the top-right border of the main UNR screen. Wireless connections are easier to achieve. Your netbook hardware will be detected and your computer will join the network automatically after you’ve entered any required passwords. However, the wired connection is better for both power use and performance. If you’ve got a spare Ethernet port on your wireless router, for example, you can use this to bridge the wireless connection from your network to the wired connection on your netbook.

Plug in an external drive and Ubuntu should display its contents.

The wired connection will stop your wireless bandwidth becoming saturated if your NAS box is uploading or downloading from the internet, and will provide other wired devices with a faster route to your data. UNR is designed to be easy to use on smaller devices. Instead of the old desktop metaphor used by standard Ubuntu, you’ll find a large array of icons arranged to mimic Ubuntu’s standard Launch menu. Click on a category in the left panel, for instance, and your screen will fill with the icons for the applications contained within the menu. And when you launch an application, UNR cleverly merges the titlebar into your screen’s top bar, saving space on small screens. But these are only cosmetic changes, and you’ll find the same old Ubuntu beneath the surface. Now we need to configure it to automatically mount your remote storage.

When you connect your external USB storage device, UNR will automatically mount the device and launch the file manager to display its contents. Your device’s actual location on the filesystem will depend on its type and name, but you can find any automatically mounted devices listed under the ‘/media’ branch from the File System icon in the manager. When you’ve identified your drive, make sure you remember its location; you’ll need this to enable either the mount point (or, more sensibly, a folder within the mount point) to be shared across your LAN.

Install Samba

Before augmenting your NAS with any other features, it’s important to get the basic functionality right. To share files on your netbook USB drive with all the other machines in your network, you need to install a server called Samba. This is the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s network protocol, which means that it will work with all of the Windows, OS X and Linux machines on your LAN. It’s the most common fileserver system and it’s used by many NAS devices. UNR doesn’t waste netbook space installing Samba by default, so you need to install it manually.

It’s fairly easy to get file sharing working under the auspices of Samba.

As with the desktop version of Ubuntu, this is best done through the Synaptic package manager, which can be found in the Administration section of the System group of applications. Just search for samba and install the resulting package. After the package has installed, switch back to the file manager view for your USB storage device. Create the directory you want to be shared across your network and right-click on the folder. You should now see ‘Sharing Options’ listed in the menu that appears. When you select this, a window will open. From that window, enable the ‘Share this folder’ and ‘Guest Access’ options. The latter could be a security risk, as it means anyone with access to your LAN will be able to read the files on your NAS. This is fine if you trust your network, but unacceptable if your network is shared. In those cases, leave ‘Guest access’ disabled and make sure that each machine you want to share the folder with has a user account and password that has an identical name and password to an existing account on your netbook.

You might also want to tick the ‘Allow others to create and delete files in this folder’ box, unless you want your file sharing to be read-only. When you’ve finished with the options, click on ‘Create share’ and ‘Add the permissions automatically’ in the window that pops up. You should see that the folder icon for your share now has two arrows across it to indicate that the folder is being shared across your LAN.

Access your files

You can now access your files from other computers on your LAN, and your NAS box should appear within their network folders.

Just type the relevant location into the address bar to access your new share.

If you need to specify an address, such as from OS X’s ‘Go | Connect to a Server’ menu or Gnome’s equivalent ‘Go | Location’ menu option, then type smb://ubuntu into the location field. This is the default hostname for our new installation, and ‘smb’ is requesting access through the Samba protocol. After a few seconds, you’ll see the folder you just created appear, and you’ll be able to access files and folders within that directory as if they were local. Congratulations, your netbook is now a NAS device!

Add online backup

To bring your NAS in line with more functional boxes, it’s time to add some packages. Backup is at the top of our list, and UNR has a feature called Ubuntu One that’s perfect for this job. This service automatically copies your local files to a remote server. You can then download them from the server to any Ubuntu machine with an Ubuntu One account. Configuration is easy: just look for the Ubuntu One logo in the Internet category, click on it and either enter your account information or create a new account. You’ll then be asked to verify your computer’s name and say that you’d like the data to be synced. A free account can store up to 2GB of data, but you can subscribe to the commercial service if you want to store more.

Ubuntu One is a decent choice of online backup tool, although you may quickly run out of space if you’re installing a NAS-load of drives.

Switch to the file manager and you should see a new Ubuntu One folder. Anything you place here will be synchronised with the Ubuntu One server. Right-click on it to enable it as a shared folder.

Security and remote access

There are many security issues surrounding opening your NAS box up to the internet, but UNR should be up to the task as long as you keep your system up to date and install any patches. You should receive automatic update alerts, but this can be a problem when using your netbook as a NAS if you end up not looking at the screen very often. The easiest solution is to enable a mode where updates are applied automatically. Find and click on the Software Sources icon and in the window that appears switch to the Updates tab. This page manages the background update tasks, and you need to tick the ‘Install security updates without confirmation’ box and change the update frequency to one your connection can handle. ‘Daily’ is fine for most installations.

If you want internet access to your box, the safest way is to use SSH (the secure shell). This provides command-line access to your NAS box using a tool such as Putty on Windows machines, or the ‘ssh’ command in Linux. You’ll need to install the openssh-server package on your box. To connect, forward TCP port 22 to your NAS box through your router and log in with your standard account details. If you prefer a graphical desktop, install the tightvncserver package on your NAS and type tightvncserver :1 into the command line to create a new session. Any VNC client on your LAN can now access a desktop on the NAS using the address ‘ubuntu:1’. To access your desktop from the internet, use SSH to pipe the VNC port through the SSH connection with ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 ubuntu.address and use a local VNC client to access ‘localhost:5901’.

Add more functionality

The best reason for using UNR on a netbook to create a NAS is that you can augment your installation with all kinds of functionality, from web servers to media players. One of the most popular is MediaTomb, a UPnP-compatible media streamer and transcoding tool that’s easy to install and configure. Install it by opening the Synaptic package manager on your netbook and searching for mediatomb. There will be several dependencies. After installation has completed, switch to the Sound and Video application launcher window and you’ll find a new MediaTomb icon. Double-click this and Firefox will launch, loading the MediaTomb web-configuration panel.

From MediaTomb’s web page, you can navigate to your media files on your storage device. Click on the ‘+’ symbol on the right to add them to the MediaTomb library. MediaTomb supports all the most common media formats. After a few moments, you’ll be able to view or listen to your content on any UPnP-compatible client such as Windows Media Player, RhythmBox, a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox 360. To run a web server from your NAS box, install the apache2 package, then type http://localhost into Firefox to see a web page that declares ‘It works!’.

All laptop users have something in common: we want our device’s batteries to last longer. Whether it’s for the daily commute or the flight home for Christmas, an extra 30 minutes of power means an extra 30 minutes of entertainment. If you’re running a Linux-based distribution on your netbook, there’s a lot you can do to squeeze every last negatively charged ion from your power source. Here we’re going to cover the best techniques that we’ve discovered. Don’t worry if you’re not a netbook user, as much of this information can be used on Linux laptops too. However, we’ve specifically tailored our advice for netbooks as these seldom include full-blown distros (and hence any easy way of compiling and installing new software). We’re going to focus on Intel’s Moblin and Canonical’s UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix), two of the most popular Linux distributions for netbooks, but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t use a full-fat distribution on your device and make the same changes to its power management.

You deserve to be able to drag every last tiny drop of power out of your laptop’s battery. It’s only fair.

Netbook Linux is still in its infancy. This means that there’s still a great deal that can be done to make these devices more power efficient, and each release of distributions like Moblin or UNR gets better at it. But it also means that hardware compatibility and power saving is experimental for each distribution, especially when you’ve installed it yourself. Until netbook distributions are built for specific netbooks, though, there’s always something you can change in a generic installation to make it work better on your own machine. We’re not talking about massive improvements, but each incremental change may stretch your battery life by around five per cent. Even if just one or two of them work out, you’ll see some extra life from your machine. Like most things to do with Linux, it just takes a little trial and error.

The easy targets

Sometimes it’s the most predictable power saving options that can reap the biggest benefits. Wireless and Bluetooth are our first targets. Even when you’re not using these connections, the radio device tucked away within your machine is still expending energy, either keeping a connection in contention or looking for new networks and devices for you to connect to. Both Moblin and UNR allow you to disable these devices from the desktop, but these options won’t necessarily completely disable the radio. The best option is to use a hotkey combination that’s dedicated to your devices. These are usually labelled in blue across the laptop’s keyboard, and typically involve you having to press the [Fn] key in conjunction with a number. The number key will normally feature a somewhat ambiguous icon that you’ll need to decode in order to figure out which number is the correct one. If you’re lucky, you’ll also see an on-screen message updating you on any progress once you’ve pressed the key.

However, some netbooks don’t have function keys to disable the wireless or Bluetooth radios, and you can’t take any chances with the software disable function. Samsung’s popular NC10 is one example of a machine that doesn’t have a keypress option. In these cases, your only course of action is to change a setting in your netbook’s BIOS – a setting that will stay fixed until you restart your machine and manually undo the change.

It might sound obvious, but switching off your laptop’s internal radios can give a significant boost to battery life.

Like many desktop machines, you can normally enter your netbook’s BIOS by quickly pressing [F2], although like the hotkeys, this is dependent on your manufacturer (as is what you can and can’t turn off within the BIOS). With the NC10, for instance, you can switch your wireless devices to ‘Always Off’ from the Boot menu within the BIOS. While you’re there, you might also want to disable the ‘Internal LAN’ setting in the Advanced menu, as the Ethernet port can steal power even while not being used. You should also make sure that any power saving modes for your device are enabled.

Screen brightness

Dimming the screen is a great way of saving some power, but this can sometimes be problematic with certain netbooks running a Linux distribution. This is because the hotkey combination may not work from the desktop, and the software isn’t always capable of changing brightness either. The Linux kernel needs to have support for your specific device. If it does, the distribution you use also needs to use the correct version of the kernel and provide a means of changing the brightness. If this isn’t the case, you might still be able to adjust the brightness of your screen from the command line.

The trick is to use a special kind of file that accesses your display hardware. As with most devices, this can be found by typing ls /sys/class/backlight/. If you’ve not encountered the ‘/sys’ series of directories before, it contains dozens of folders and files that refer to each of the devices on your system. Rather than representing the files and folders on a storage device, this structure is a portal for configuring any plug-and-play hardware discovered on your system, and that includes devices like your netbook’s screen, CPU and drive.

To change values in the /sys tree, you will need to switch to the administrator’s account on your machine. Ubuntu users won’t be able to use sudo in the way they might be used to because the command to change values is really two commands, one piping output to another. The sudo privileges will only apply to the first and won’t stretch to allow you to change the parameter in the second. You can get around this by launching a new bash session using sudo, which will start a pseudo-administrator mode where every subsequent command is executed with root privileges. Moblin users just need to type su followed by their root password to get the same thing.

The contents of ‘/sys/class/backlight/’ should look something like ‘acpi_video0’, but this is dependent on the kernel driver for your hardware. Beneath this directory, you’ll find a special type of file called ‘brightness’. If you probe the value of this file by typing cat acpi_video0/brightness, for instance, you’ll see the current brightness setting for your screen. This is usually within the range of 0 to 100, and may jump up in steps that are defined by your hardware’s capabilities. The converse of this probe operation is to pass a value to this special file, hopefully changing your screen brightness in the process. Typing echo 100 > acpi_video0/brightness, for example, will configure maximum brightness, while a value in the region of 15 should be close to your screen’s minimum.

CPU optimisation

We’re going to stick within the /sys subsystem to make a few changes to how the CPU is handled. This can be a rather experimental area to play around with, which may explain why many distributions choose not to enable some of the more optimal modes, but it can be worth the trial and error. It’s also dependent on the features embedded within your CPU. Recent models built around Intel’s newer Atom processors shouldn’t have any problems, but older models may not be so flexible. You should also make sure you’ve got a backup of any critical data on your netbook’s drive before trying things out.

The most important parameter can be discovered by typing cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. If your machine returns a value of 0, then Laptop mode is currently disabled. You can enable it by typing echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. When Laptop mode is enabled, the kernel takes special care only to shuttle data to your storage device when it needs to, saving your battery in the process. You can disable this by swapping the 1 for a 0 in the previous command.

You can get even deeper into how the processor handles tasks by changing how the scheduler works. This is only going to be beneficial if you’ve got a multicore machine, and it changes the way processes are loaded onto each core. Check the contents of the ‘/sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings’ location. If this is set to 0, your netbook is configured for optimal CPU performance – which is useful for mathematically intensive apps, but not so great if you’re only planning to read a couple of emails. Changing this value to 1 will ask the scheduler to use the threads and processes more efficiently before more are created, effectively saving your other CPU cores from being used and saving energy in the process.

Process pruning

The best thing about a netbook distro is that it is already pruned down to the bare minimum of applications and running processes. There should be very little you can do to improve things here, but there’s never any harm in taking a look. The quickest and easiest way of checking what processes are running is to run the ‘top’ command from the command line. It may look a little perfunctory, but it tells you everything you need to know. It’s called top because it shows you a list of the processes sorted by CPU time, with the highest at the top. This list changes dynamically, and the processes at the top usually include top itself, the Xorg X-Server (which is rendering the graphics on the screen) and maybe the gnome terminal (if this is how you’re running top). You can also remove processes and change their priority, but you need to be careful about this as you could seriously affect the performance of your netbook (and even lose some of your data). The safest option is to look for tasks that are running under your user account: you should be able to see your name in the second column for any tasks falling into that category.

On Moblin 2.0, for instance, we’ve noticed that the Nautilus file manager is used to manage external storage such as USB sticks. Occasionally, especially when you remove a USB stick without first unmounting it, Nautilus is left running, taking up precious CPU cycles. You’ll even be able to see that it’s the process connected to the USB device because this path follows the name of the process. You can remove tasks by pressing [K] to enter Kill mode and then entering the process number. This is listed in the top output below the top line. If you’re running a standard Linux installation, then there are a great number of processes you might want to consider removing. These could include indexing routines, compositing managers, background servers and log file generation. Further information can be found by looking at how the ‘initd’ process works and working out how to disable these services at bootup.

Monitor process power consumption

One of the best tools for monitoring and tweaking your system’s power efficiency is called PowerTop. It’s the electrical power consumption equivalent to the ‘top’ command we used to measure CPU usage, and it should be available through your distribution’s package manager. Moblin users can find it by searching for ‘Power consumption monitor’ in the Add/Remove Software panel. It needs to be run from the command line with system administrator privileges, which means typing sudo powertop for Ubuntu users or su followed by powertop for Moblin.

PowerTop can give you a very accurate indication of how long your netbook will last with its current power usage.

It will take five seconds for the tool to initially monitor your current system, after which it will list the various offending tasks running on your system sorted according to the amount of power they consume. The top section of the tool displays the percentage of time your CPU spends running at a specific speed. More CPU-intensive tasks will switch to a faster power state, which will in turn take more electricity. Ideally, you should expect to spend most of your time in the C4 state (the slowest), with occasional bursts of activity in the fastest state, C1.

PowerTop was originally designed to show which tasks were preventing laptops from entering a sleep state, and it’s still useful for this kind of bug fixing (though hopefully your distro builder has already solved the most serious offenders). This is why you still see the processes listed as ‘Top causes for wakeup’, as these are the events that are interrupting the system.

Unlike nearly every other tool we can think of, PowerTop also displays some useful information that can help you stretch out your netbook’s battery life. If it detects anything that it knows will help, a suggestion will pop up at the bottom of the window. Your adjustment will last for the duration of the current session only, but the tips that PowerTop displays often include instructions on how to make each change more permanent.

Proper sleep function

Suspending your machine by closing the lid and then opening it again seldom has the desired effect with Linux. It’s often easier to just turn the machine off and on again. Things are a lot better than they were, but hibernation is one area of the kernel that remains problematic. The difficulty is that each piece of hardware within your system needs to respond predictably to the sleep call, and this requires well-behaved drivers that have a good understanding of their hardware capabilities.

Unfortunately, this can’t be said for many Linux device drivers – in particular those for graphics cards. The only exception is hardware developed by Intel. Intel has made a big investment in Linux, and it continues to make massive improvements to the drivers for its own hardware. The Moblin distribution is the pinnacle of this work, and you should find that sleep works well with most Atom-based machines, as well as those that use other kinds of Intel processors. If you need to cater for hardware from other manufacturers, the best piece of advice we can give you is to make sure that your kernel is as up to date as possible. Things are changing all the time in the Linux world, and you may find that any problems have already been fixed with a kernel update.

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