In tune with the awareness about the environment, GillSoft also reviewed the current usage of resources. Saving electricity came out to be at the top of the list. In Ireland, we use electricity generated using thermal energy. This not only depletes the natural resources but also adds to Ireland's carbon-footprint!

Our development server was a dual core AMD Athlon X64 based server running on Linux. It was used for following purposes

• SCM - Git. About 35 repositories. We used to use Subversion earlier.
• Mail server - for sending mails related to SCM only though. not heavy duty stuff here.
• Apache web-server to provide web interface to git repositories.
• Redmine for bugs and task management.
• openssh server to serve Git repositories over SSH

We found that using this server was an overkill because all of the above services did not require too much of CPU power. As an experiment, we tried Raspberry PI and Beagle Bone Black (BBB). Though both performed well, we went for BBB.

As I write, "uptime" command shows 182 days! Previous run was more than 80 days. Only one reboot in over 250 days!

We are planning to use more units of BBB for following purposes:

• Print Server + PDF Document generator
• Asterisk PBX Server

More on those later!