Inside our server
This is our server
As said in the main ABOUT US article, these are the server spec.
- A Computer made by Fujitsu:
- Pentium II processor (266 MHz)
- 32MB RAM (2MB powering the graphics) that was at the time of writing, now we have 128MB split over two 64MB chips!
- ATI Rage II onboard graphics
- 8GB Hard drive (plenty of space ;-) )
- Slackware Linux 10.2 (2.4.31)
but people keep asking us what our server looks like on the inside, well we were never going to turn off our server just open it to take some pictures! But when the server died, we were forced to open it up to replace the PSU and I just so happened to have a camera handy, so here comes the grand tour!
This is the front of the server, on the front you can see the 3 1/2 " floppy drive and the 24x CD-ROM drive (we don't need a DVD or CD-RW, this is a server!) There is also the Power button (obviously) and the status LEDs, a USB port (for charging up MP3 players! ;-) ) a microphone port and a headphone port (although the sound drivers are not installed as they are not used/needed!)
Oh... what is this on the lower left hand side...?
Windows, on a server? I don't think so somehow! (yes James, I'm talking to you!)
"life is more open without Windows or Gates" - That quote is so true!
The 8 gigabyte hard drive is shown in the picture above, it is a Hand-me-down it has been in 5 (yes 5!) different computers! So it has had a lot of experience!
Here is a bit of vintage technology! A Pentium II on a Slot 1 interface, man, this should be in a musium! It runs at 266MHz, at this slow speed, it doen't even require a fan to keep it cool, the large heat sinc seems to take care of it! In the background you can see the 100MBps network interface card, not really that interesting, people still use those today! Oh, do I see some RAM next to the PII prosesser?
Yes but at 32MB it is easy to miss! This is the culprit for the site taking a while to load (especially the forum!) When the server is running, ALL 32MB of the RAM is in use, and everything else gets overflowed to the SWAP space (on the hard drive) The hard drive is MUCH slower than RAM, so if anything is going to be upgraded soon, the RAM is the first choice!
29/11/2006 We have now upgraded to 128MB and wow, what a speed difference!
Ah yes now you can see what is in our server, you can now see how some old technology can be recycled and used to do some background work!
And that is our server!
OP-EZY - News
29/11/2006 New RAM (128MB) the site should now load alot faster!
Ok, I doubt that this news is going to happen!
Exciting news, coming VERY, VERY soon! Watch this space!
Web mail, almost here!!
PHP scripts seem to be working (along with MySQL!)
We have a new download server that is now fully FTP based!