A new server
August 13th, 2006 by SplineGuy
There are currently a few bugs still to be worked out but, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the transition to the new server has gone fairly smoothly. You might’ve noticed my weather plugin on the sidebar is on the fritz.
The primary reason for the switch was that the previous server was a borrowed machine. It was here only until I found a suitable and affordable replacement. The $75 computer mentioned in yesterday’s entry was a perfect solution since it allowed me to toy with LINUX and do so cheaply.
I have some familiarity with LINUX and UNIX through my research that I did at the HPCC at TTU. The SGI Origin 2000 multiprocessor ran IRIX, the SGI version of UNIX. I can still remember my first few days learning it. It had been years and years since my experience in command line environments, even then it was either the Applesoft BASIC environment or booting MSDOS from the floppy. I wasn’t even in High School yet. Still, it helped quite a bit to have had that experience and to have developed a sense of “tinkering”.
As for my server, I went with the default configuration for the SUB-100, namely Xubuntu. As I understand it, this is probably the most ideal version of LINUX for an older machine. At any rate, I added Apache2, PHP, MySQL, ssh support, SAMBA (to share data on a recently purchased 160G hard drive with my windows machines on my home network), ftp support, an SMTP server (req. authentication), and I think that is about it.
Each step along the way took anywhere from a few minutes (Apache, PHP, MySQL) to 5 or 6 hours (SMTP, FTP). I am most proud to have successfully set up the webserver to point to my ext. hard drive and then also allow each of the other 3 computers that regularly use the home network to access it as a shared drive.
Some people fear change….
Not me, I fear stagnation. If something stays the same too long, I’ll break it, just to fix it. That is, as long as it relates to technology. I’ve had enough of that stupid swimming pool!
