I finally found a use for my cash register: a web server. Yeah, why not? It's really small, takes up hardly any juice, has a big enough drive for an OS (I'm doing the web server's docroot as a read-only NFS mount from my main shared fileserver), and has a strong enough CPU (233MHz) to serve plain (or slightly PHP'ed/Perl'ed) web pages. And its most important feature of all is its LED-on-a-stick.
I'm putting Linux on it. It's Red Hat 8.0 for now (just because I think think it's hilarious, and I want to get in shape for Red Hat's appearance at SD Tech Books on Sunday), but I'll eventually wind up with one of the tiny linux distributions (like the ones that boot off a write-protected floppy). I may even do it diskless. It depends on how much work I want to put into it. Gentoo would be super cool...
Why the new install? Well, the LED-on-a-stick simply demands use. It's been languishing for a long time for wont of a good purpose. I also need to separate my main fileserver from the outside world. I have port 80 open to it now, and that isn't good. I want a little separation. I can harden the web server system fairly tightly without inconveniencing anyone overly much if it is its own entity. I also have the hardware available; the cash register has just been sitting there doing nothing. And I've been wanting to write stuff that gets displayed on the stick real bad.
What goes on the stick? Well, I have stock quotes, weather, and system load already written. I need to add the currently streaming MP3, the last login name and time, uptime, free memory, disk use, and the date/time. I'm also going to make it flash "12:00". I have to. And before you laugh at me, you must first admit that if you had an LED-on-a-stick, you would make it flash "12:00" too. Check your own self. That's all I'm saying.
As an aside, the fine folks at LCDproc are making this all possible. They wrote me when my cash register page somehow got posted to Slashdot. (BTW, I'm still wondering why it made Slashdot; it really wasn't all that interesting. I must admit that it was worth it just for this comment, however. I searched the Slashdot story page for 'tracy' and just got another 3 minutes worth of chcukle. Tess really does r0x0r.) They said they'd be happy to have their software write to vacuum flourescent displays, and I wrote them back saying I'd be happy to help them get the drivers working. After the story was posted, I also got a lot of email from people saying that they'd love to have drivers for their VFDs, so it's for a good cause.
What I won't be doing is printing from it. I finally found out why the thermal printer stopped working. Something happened to the parallel port and the printer shuts off as soon as I connect it to the main unit. It works fine on any other system. I'm going to have to dig around inside the cash register's main unit and find out what the story is. I checked the BIOS and nothing was amiss. If worst comes to worst, I might be able to get Trey to swap out a new motherboard. I could put my NIC and disk in a new case and it should work. Although Trey wouldn't be able to use a unit that can't print, so I don't think he'll be too amenable to that solution. Still, it'll server web pages fine.
Install is done. Time to configure stuff...