About this server
This blog is hosted on my server, which is sitting in a Maidenhead co-location facility. It’s a self build rackmount system, running Fedora 8 with lots of custom configuration. Here’s the low down.
Hardware
- AMD Athlon BE-2400. It’s a dual core 45 watt part.
- 80% efficient 220 watt PSU. This makes a huge difference to power consumption.
- 2 x 1Gb cheap memory. Yes, I know, but the performance stuff just consumes more power.
- 2 x 500GiB Western Digital GP disks. Good performance at a fraction of the power.
- AMD 690V based motherboard.
The emphasis here has been on cool lower power, but without sacrificing necessary performance. Note how I qualify that as ‘necessary performance’. I don’t need the fastest CPU on the planet, or the lowest seek times. I am running a web hosting platform, and have minimum requirements to support the number of users I desire. My second requirement is to keep power consumption low, since the co-location facility charges for excess power. So the platform is balanced.
Software (based on a Fedora 8 install)
- Dovecot POP3/IMAP, with MySQL auth. Lots of paranoid checks. No spam yet :-).
- Postfix SMTP, authorizing against dovecot (no need for seperate MySQL backend).
- Apache 2.2, with mod_php disabled (that’s really important).
- MySQL 5, with custom scripts for database management.
- mod_fcgid, used to support PHP 5, and in future Ruby-on-rails. No PHP 4 here.
- PureFTPD with auth against MySQL.
- Fail2Ban log monitor. Tweaked for paranoia.
- SSH on a non-standard port (don’t bother scanning, you’ll be banned).
- Custom ip-tables firewall, verging on paranoid.
Presently I am hosting my own blog, gallery and photosomething.
Each user represents a single virtual host in Apache, but with some sneaky rewrite rules and redirects to support unlimited domains, without duplicating resources.
Now, how do I go about selling space?
