This tutorial tries to show you how to setup a wonderful quiet fanless system.
I’ve bought a LEX NEO, a terribly nice Mini-ITX fanless barebone which includes an onboard bootable CF-card slot.
Thomas Bocek (nope.ch) helped me out with the following configuration.
The idea was:

• The harddisk should only run when used
• The whole system should be stored on a CF-card
• We don’t want to stress our CF-card. Directories with a lot of access like /var/log should be run in RAM

We decided to install Debian Linux by USB-install, using a USB-stick instead of running some PXE network install which seems to be far more complicated.
Here’s a short HOWTO (for more detailed instructions, please check Debian USB memory stick booting:
Download boot.img.gz (7.9 MB). Also, download the official netinst image (108 MB). If you can’t find it, check http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ and download the stable i386 version.

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Rsync is a command line utility traditionally used in synchronizing files between two computers over the network, but rsync can also be used as an effective backup tool.
This article explains how to use rsync to backup your whole Linux system setup to a second drive attached to your system. You can use a removable drive, such as an external USB hard drive, so that you can store the backups in a safe place away from your working environment.

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