Clogging up the Web

A couple of days ago I put my new “server” live. It hosts this blog and a few other things.

I put server in quotes because it really is only an old IBM Thinkpad T20 notebook that is over 5 years old. It has a 700MHz PIII, 256MB RAM and a 40GB 5400 RPM hard drive. It’s had a few parts replaced over the years, so it’s not all over 5 years old. It works quite well and has the added bonus of a built-in UPS in the form of a Li-Ion battery that gives it about 3 hours in the event of a power cut. A power cut will cut my broadband connection, but when power is restored, my connection will return automatically and assuming the power cut doesn’t last for hours, so will my server.

It is running CentOS 4.2 (I prefer SLES9, but that requires a maintenance contract), Apache 2.0.52 (CentOS updated), PHP 5.1.1 (which I maintain), MySQL 5.0.17 (I again maintain), PostgreSQL 8.1.1 (I maintain), Ruby 1.8.2 (I maintain), Rails 1.0.0 (I maintain).

I have a broadband connection from a local company Amocom. It is wireless with a fixed ip address and has 512Kbps upload and 512Kbps download. For my purposes this is perfectly adequate and the upload, which is most important for hosting, is 2 or 4 times that of currently available DSL. That is more important to me than any download speed.

I have a wirelss broadband router with 4 ethernet ports. I actually use the wireless card on my laptop for connectivity. It took a bit of effort to get it working with CentOS 4, but I got there in the end and now it works automatically on boot up.

Its not a perfect hosted server solution, but there are some people who would give their right arm to be able to set that up without going near a data centre.