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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:
-
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, specifically; FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p7
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 Susi (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
Wed Mar 10 19:57:07 CET 2010
# uptime
7:57PM up 11 days, 19 mins, 0 users, load averages: 0.50, 0.49, 0.42
# apache
Server uptime: 11 days 18 minutes 12 seconds
Total accesses: 56242 - Total Traffic: 432.7 MB
Parent Server Generation: 1
-> Show Detailed Status Graphs - 'Hobbes' is my desktop system, an Acer Aspire M3201:
- This is a AMD Athlon X2 system, twin core 64 bit processor, 3Gb ram, decent hardware all round with lots of USB ports etc. It has an additional ATI graphics card (HD4350) and is very quiet in operation.
- It runs 64-bit Fedora Linux, with the Gnome desktop. It also runs Windows Vista (this is a twin-boot system) so I have a good platform for a bit of gaming and can run some programs that are windows-only.
- 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.
- A FRITZ!box, very nice, lots of clever features, and free courtesy of my ISP.
- If you have any questions; please email me using the address here and I'll try to help..
