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How the EasyTarget hangs together
Looking For Owens Personal Website?
..go to http://easytarget.me.uk/
for my photos, blog and more..
This is the 'root' of Owens' web server.
- You are now looking at the default page for my Apache web server, running on my home FreeBSD powered server system. It is run on completely open source, 100% Microsoft Free, Software.
- My Main website, gallery, webcam, etc. comes from my personal server in my apartment:
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The heart of my website is 'Calvin', my old IBM Thinkpad G40 laptop, her screen died, so she has been adapted to work as a server.
She's a 2800Mhz PentiumIV based system with 512Mb of memory, a 1Tb external disk, and an interesting dust puppy living inside. -
Software-wise, She runs FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p2
as her Operating System.
- FreeBSD is one of a number of Open Source, BSD style operating systems.
- It's extremely fast, stable and secure.
- It has the FreeBSD portage mechanism, always up to date.
- The price, as they say, is right.. Free as in Beer.
- And the politics are right too.. Free as in Speech. - On top of that I have layered a number of other Open Source applications:
-
-
Apache 2.0 + mod_ssl
- The industry standard bullet-proof, secure web server.
- SSL gives me a secure web session for reading my webmail. -
WebCam
- It's really Cheap'n'Cheerful, an old Philips PWC640 (TuCam) webcam.
- All lashed together with some cheezy shell scripts..
- ..it's the funkiest thing on my site :-) -
Samba
- Provides a network file system for Hobbes and Suzi (see below). -
SSH
- Lets me log in to Clavin from anywhere on the Internet.
- I normally use PuTTY for this, its excellent and free, it also does SSH tunnels, telnet, sftp, etc! -
Munin
- Collects various system data every five minutes.
- Then it generates graphs of system performance over time.
- Finally it wraps it all up in HTML to create an online overview of the whole system.
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Apache 2.0 + mod_ssl
- I run this system without any monitor, keyboard or mouse attached, it sits inconspicuously in my kitchen cupboard. When I need to connect I simply SSH from my workstations, and run the whole server from the command line.
-
Current status:
# date
Sat Jul 4 06:28:44 CEST 2009
# uptime
6:28AM up 9 days, 14:29, 0 users, load averages: 0.01, 0.07, 0.02
# apache
Server uptime: 9 days 14 hours 28 minutes 22 seconds
Total accesses: 42584 - Total Traffic: 317.7 MB
Parent Server Generation: 1
-> Show Detailed Status Graphs - 'Hobbes' is my desktop system, home built:
- Based around a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ cpu, with 1Gb ram, It has a lot more performance that I ever need, even though it's slow by modern standards.
- It runs Gentoo Linux, with KDE. I use the Gentoo portage mechanism to synchronise with the the current stable (usable) Gentoo base system and applications. My KDE setup is more aggressive, since I want access to features that work, but are not considered fully 'stable'. This also means that the whole system has been bootstrapped and built from source, improving performance and giving me a lot of experience with emerge.
- My Netbook, an Asus Aspire One A110L, running ArchLinux she is the perfect portable work and media machine, under a kilo in weight and small enough to just slip in any bag!
- She has a widescreen display, and wireless networking, so surfing on my balcony is a nice way to end the day. I use her as a portable media player for movies and internet radio, regularly listening to the BBC online.
- If you have any questions; please email me using the address here and I'll try to help..
