Why Cubieboard 2 – CB2

I’ve been running a mail server on a older AMD machine for several years. It sits there doing very little and sucking up 82 watts or power. The CB2 has a SATA port, there are distros based on Ubuntu 14.04 and the power draw with a SSD is about 3 watts.

The earlier Cubieboard 1 would be powerful enough, but the distro support has mostly moved on the the CB2 and the Cubietruck. The Cubietruck seems to be a CB2 with a few extra features and much higher price.

So I got the CB2 development kit which includes a plastic case and leads, and added a 64GB SSD. With long 3mm screws, the SSD can be mounted to the lid of the case before it is screwed in place.

A 5V regulator in heatshrink is stuck to the side of the case. This allows input voltages from 9V to 30V DC. At 12V DC, the input current draw hovers around 160mA. During startup it peaks at about 250mA.

Linux Distro

It’s running Linaro server based on Ubuntu 14.04. The procedure was to save the distro image to a micro-SD card for convenience, then flash the image to on-board NAND, then copy the NAND image to the SSD and edit the boot file to look at the SSD.

That’s the simple version. I may transfer my notes over to here later on.

With Linaro 14.04 running from the SSD, it behaves pretty much like any Ubuntu server install. The apt commands work and install.setup is not too difficult.

I did forget to resize the image on SSD and although it looked like a 64GB drive, I ran out of space at 2GB. Easily fixed and everything carried on.

It’s now running fetchmail, postfix, dovecot etc. and seesm to be working well.