guusbosmannl

For those of you interested in the technology behind Guus Bosman.NL, here's the story on the new server.

Last week my parents gave me some old hardware, a Pentium and a 486. Pretty old computers, but perhaps strong enough to be servers. Coincidentally, Friday the original server (opa) broke down, and I couldn't reboot it. Therefore I was forced in a way to speed up the transition to a new server. This weekend I've been working on it. First, I had to see if the hardware was okay -- it turned out to work fine, especially the Pentium.

Second, I had to choose an operating system. I looked at Redhat (required 32 MB, too much) and Slackware (to install it you need 7 diskettes -- and I hate diskettes). The OS I choose was OpenBSD, it comes on a single floppy and considers security very important.
Installation of OpenBSD was really smooth. I set up my Windows 2000 machine as a HTTP proxy (so not to worry about installing NAT software on the w2k computer), and the Pentium was installed using a single diskette and this proxy. Apache came pre-installed; fetching PHP and MySQL was easy.

In the mean time, I found some information about how to upgrade my ADSL modem to a real router... quite interesting! My modem now serves as a DHCP server, DNS server (local), NAT router and firewall... It made working with the OpenBSD PC a lot easier; no need to install PPTP software anymore.

Currently, Guus Bosman.nl is still quite slow (16 MB is just too little for both PHP and MySQL). However, I still have some memory chips in my parents' place I think... If I install these performance should increase dramatically. Also I'm looking at a separate MySQL server. The 486 has some conflicts (IRQ) that I just couldn't solve with OpenBSD. I have even been thinking on installing Windows on it but I don't have a 95 version, and the newer versions are too big. Anyway; in a maybe a week or so I hope to see my parents again, and then the party can begin ;)

I've been working on the hardware all evening, and the results: at this moment I have:

• A Pentium 100 with 16MB memory, 800 MB harddisk
• A 486 with 24 MB memory, 200 MB harddisk

They both boot, but that's it :) Now I'll install a second network card in my Windows 2000 computer, to give the new ones internet access.

Obviously after such a long time working with Windows 2000 I don't have any boot disks. This could have been a serious problem but TechW0rm comes to the rescue.

I needed the bootdisk to find the CMOS password. And this W0rm is pretty nice, it contains a small program called 'CMOSPWD.EXE'... BIOS password turned out to be 'VOLVO'.

The Pentium boots! Well, that is to say, it's now asking for a bootable floppy disk. It doesn't recognize the harddisk, so I'll have to look in the BIOS. But, how does that work again: clearing a BIOS' password...

Last weekend we installed a nice tool for remote management of the server, VNC. It's atool that gives you access to the desktop of the server (yes we know a Windows server is less stable, and yes we would like a Linux server, but no, we didn't have time for it).

Anyway, it works great but tonight there seems to be something wrong, and it gave me the following beautiful picture that I wanted to share:

I'm enjoying this new software (PhpNuke) a lot! I know that the website is quite slow, but when you ignore that I'm really happy with all the pre-made functionality the software offers. I've been looking for extensions of the software (there is a lot), and I've found some really useful extensions. You know how it is... a website is just a replacement for Lego sometimes :)

I've been looking around for new hardware, and it looks like I've found something. So in a while the performance should be back to normal, and than I can make the current page the starting page.

Enough internet for tonight, going to read my book.

At this moment the new website is life for 12 hours. Yesterday evening I went to see Tibor, as Guus Bosman.nl runs on his server.

When I came there it turned that out that one of the harddisks of the webserver had crashed, for the 2nd time. There wasn't very important data on these disks, but we still tried to recover some of the information during the evening. I the mean time (while Tibor was downloading software) I installed PHP, MySQL and PhpNuke on the webserver, this went pretty smooth. Around 23:15 the installation was complete but there was something technical wrong, that I couldn't find a solution for. I went home, and this morning I found the answer, and I put the website life!

People told me that it looked nice but that the website is too slow to be able to tell. I looked into software caching for PHP, but frankly I don't think that that would really do the trick. It's a low-traffic site, and the performance lag is related to the server: it's an old 486 with 24 MB memory. That's just not strong enough ;)

So if anybody has an old computer with >= 32 MB memory in it, and wants to get rid of it, please let us know, I would be very happy with it.

For now: I hope you'll still enjoy Guus Bosman.NL. For those users with a slow connection or no time to wait I'll put a HTML copy of my logbook online as often as I can. This will be reachable through www.guusbosman.nl/blogger.html.

Hmm... one of the two hard-disks of the webserver crashed this afternoon, and it was the one with my website on it. Of course I have a decent backup system in place, so about three hours after I found out the whole thing was up-and-running again.

Thank you Maarten & Janneke for your assistance! The web-adminstration tools of our webserver are really good, but sometimes you need a fysical reboot :)

Oops, found out my website is *really* getting old. Working on it, promise. I'm looking forward to see Tibor & Janneke anyway, maybe I can combine the pleasant with the useful ("het aangename met het nuttige verenigen" as we say in Dutch).

There's a temporary version of guusbosman.nl online now, hope that I'll have time soon to install the real one. Was really early at work -- found out what happens when you're the first and forget to turn of the alarm: a lot of noise :)