Ubuntu Server on Pentium II

For a Pentium II machine I recently revitalized, I wanted to install only the most essential software, so I started from the Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 CD. I did an expert install, since this particular motherboard, an Elitegroup (ECS) P6BX-A+ with Award BIOS, doesn't play nice with GRUB. Plus I planned on some little tweaks, like setting a static IP from the get-go and making a more server-like partitioning scheme.

NOTE: Unless you specify otherwise via the expert installer, Ubuntu disables login as root.

After completing the base installation, during which I opted to use all available repositories, I updated the package indices and installed the necessary packages for X, plus a window manager and other conveniences.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install x-window-system-core xdm fluxbox xterm

Then I rebooted and was delighted to find the X server started without a single problem.

While installing additional packages, I discovered that it took an intolerably long time to connect to the repositories. Once I installed Firefox, I observed similar delays in loading pages. For some reason, disabling IPv6 (via about:config) got Firefox working, but apt-get remained sluggish. So I used traceroute in the hope of finding the cause.

Apart from the delay in passing through the gateway, which I also observed on my Debian box when I traced the same route for comparison, it wasn't resolving domain names. Instead of the expected output,

traceroute to us.archive.ubuntu.com (91.189.89.8), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  1.931 ms  1.680 ms  1.782 ms
2  * * *
3  XX-N-N-XXNN.XXXXXXX.pa.panjde.comcast.net (NN.NN.NNN.NN)  8.599 ms  7.877 ms  9.530 ms
4  XX-NN-XXNN.XXXXXXX.pa.panjde.comcast.net (NN.NN.NNN.NNN)  9.573 ms  8.122 ms  9.572 ms
5  XX-NN-XXNN.XXXXXXXX.de.panjde.comcast.net (NN.NN.NNN.NNN)  10.248 ms  8.929 ms  9.522 ms
6  po-10-ur01.norristown.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.209.98)  10.724 ms  9.759 ms  9.519 ms
7  po-10-ur02.norristown.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.209.102)  9.838 ms  10.222 ms  9.526 ms
8  po-21-ar01.wallingford.pa.panjde.comcast.net (68.86.209.106)  12.028 ms  11.325 ms  11.952 ms
9  68.86.91.182 (68.86.91.182)  14.310 ms  14.387 ms  14.187 ms
10  68.86.85.2 (68.86.85.2)  13.551 ms  13.315 ms  14.142 ms
11  68.86.84.153 (68.86.84.153)  17.783 ms  16.573 ms  17.901 ms
12  te-1-3-pr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.84.154)  18.032 ms  16.492 ms  16.894 ms
13  xe-3-1-0.was11.ip.tiscali.net (213.200.84.117)  16.672 ms  17.544 ms  16.504 ms
14  so-6-1-0.lon11.ip.tiscali.net (213.200.80.26)  94.043 ms  93.927 ms  93.544 ms
15  01502-004-01-gw.ip.tiscali.net (213.200.77.114)  93.777 ms  93.384 ms  93.506 ms
16  195.72.129.70 (195.72.129.70)  92.104 ms  90.699 ms  91.123 ms
17  byrd.canonical.com (91.189.88.11)  93.688 ms  93.222 ms  94.142 ms
18  * * *

every line looked like lines 9-11 above: no FQDN, only an IP. That pointed to a DNS problem. So I opened resolv.conf and found that the resolver had been using my router as its name server—a less than ideal configuration, since my router is an entry-level Linksys. I merely changed resolv.conf to read

search hsd1.pa.comcast.net.
nameserver 68.87.75.194
nameserver 68.87.64.146

and restarted networking services:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

and it worked flawlessly.

The server install achieved exactly what I envisioned for this box: low resource usage. Here's the process tree right now, with one user active.

init─┬─atd
     ├─cron
     ├─cupsd
     ├─dd
     ├─events/0
     ├─6*[getty]
     ├─khelper
     ├─5*[kjournald]
     ├─klogd
     ├─ksoftirqd/0
     ├─kswapd0
     ├─kthread─┬─aio/0
     │         ├─kacpid
     │         ├─kblockd/0
     │         ├─kgameportd
     │         ├─khubd
     │         ├─kseriod
     │         └─2*[pdflush]
     ├─mdadm
     ├─migration/0
     ├─shpchpd_event
     ├─sshd───sshd───sshd───bash─┬─firefox-bin───2*[{firefox-bin}]
     │                           └─pstree
     ├─syslogd
     ├─udevd
     ├─watchdog/0
     └─xdm─┬─Xorg
           └─xdm

Yes, I'm writing this post in Firefox on the Ubuntu server with X forwarding to my laptop. Remember, this is a Pentium II at 450MHz, circa 1998. Legacy hardware has a place in modern computing—in the third bedroom, right beside my main Debian box.