I've recently been helping out in the background with a web-site. None of my own content, for this particular site I'm the behind-the-scenes person who happens to know Wordpress.

Anyway, it was decided that to avoid making accidental changes to the live site, we'd have a second copy running on something else. We're using a Raspberry Pi, which has been fun to do in its own right. The general gist has been to set up a presspi turnkey wordpress environment on the Pi.

Slight warning, it gets a bit technical from here.

The Presspi configuration includes a pre-configured version of Ubuntu Linux, NGINX server, a SQL server and the the relevant Wordpress installation.

Once the Pi has a basic operating system, it can be DHCP LAN attached via ethernet and then accessed without a monitor and keyboard by using a remote terminal program such as OS/X Terminal (or PuTTY)

Access to the generated web site has required a small change to the network /private/etc/hosts file, so that the Domain Name Services will resolve the PressPi server name references.

Accessing the Pi Presspi remotely has required getting underneath the usual OS/X shell down to the 'green screen' version of the Mac Operating system.

Inevitably, there's some flashback moments editing with raw Unix commands, but the end result of running a Wordpress system hosted on a $30 box the size of a pack of playing cards is still quite entertaining. Next will be to try with the Vocore, which is even smaller. At this rate I can see how easy it could be to just lose the whole server down the back of a shelf.