Introductions, and expansion on minimalist Debian 6 SolarNode setup

This is my first post on the Greenstage blog, so a brief introduction is in order. I've been developing the SolarNetwork platform since meeting John Gorman in mid-2008. I was already interested in renewable energy, and a proponent of open source software, so SolarNetwork was a natural fit. John introduced me to Philip Court later that year, and eventually we joined forces formally as Greenstage Power, Ltd. with myself as CTO. SolarNetwork has already evolved considerably in many exciting ways over these past few years, and I look forward to seeing where the future takes it.

As for the original impetus for this post, I've expanded on Philip's previous post on setting up Debian 6 for a SolarNode on an eBox 3300 mini computer. Some of the improvements in this guide are:

• Stock i386 Debian kernel used
• OpenNTPD for time synchronization (instead of usual ntpd)
• Monit for process monitoring
• busybox-syslogd in-memory cyclic syslog
• SolarNode platform uses a ramdisk for logging, temporary files, and the embedded database

These last two points greatly reduce the number of writes the system performs on disk, with the idea of reducing writes to the flash-based media used as the system's main filesystem.

The guide is available on the SolarNetwork Wiki. The entire system described by that guide is also available as a downloadable disk image that you can easily copy to a SD card or USB stick.