[time-nuts] lightweight webserver for, e.g., NTP widget

[Jim Lux]

I'm intrigued by the possibility of using a lightweight web server to 
provide a management/user interface to test equipment or appliances 
(e.g. like the NTP server recently discussed, or a box with mixers and 
counters).

I've built some web interfaces to very small things using Arduinos and 
Rabbits, and it works ok for simple stuff (turning on and off switches), 
but as soon as you start looking at a bit more complexity (e.g. you want 
to move files around), a bit more sophistication on your server seems 
useful.  Or, for instance, if you have a DDS you want to program to 
follow a particular sequence of frequencies (e.g. to match a particular 
Doppler profile, in my case). Or a data acquisition application.

The appeal that the "user client" is that any old web-browser is pretty 
generic.

I've done this "sort of" by exposing a directory as a public share (SMB) 
and then "browsing" to that file, using the file:// mechanism, but it 
seems that actually having a real server might be useful (for things 
like POST from a form, for instance)

But, on the other hand, it seems that something like Apache is a bit 
much to manage.

Is there something that runs under Linux on a lightweight single board 
PC (Raspberry pi or Intel Mini-ITX Atom mobos) that isn't too much of a 
pain, and doesn't require you to be a full time web server administrator 
to make it work?