Michael Walker

My Server

January 14, 2010 at 11:08am Tagged: server and linux, with 1 Comment

I've decided to remove the generally weeks-out-of-date server page from my website and instead post about it here whenever I do a significant or interesting change. So, this post isn't really anything new, it's just covering/updating the server page that currently exists.

My server was built on the 22nd of July, 2009, and is named Eihort. All of my computers are named after Great Old Ones—some people use celestial bodies or flowers as a naming scheme, I use ancient powerful deities waiting for the stars to be right to destroy us all…

Hardware

Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-GC230D

Processor

Intel Atom 230

Case

Compucase 8K07

PSU

120W

HDD

60GB 2.5" Fujitsu MHT2060AT

Memory

1GB DDR2

Functionality

Currently my server is being a jack-of-all-trades, everything I can think of that a networked computer would be useful for (NTP server, SAMBA, torrenting, bitlbee, …) it does. So, rather than list all of the software used on it I'll just describe what it does:

Web server

I have a local webserver which contains my homepage, the control panel for the server, and various other utilities. It also houses my RSS/Atom feed aggregator which checks for updates hourly.

IM

Ok, this isn't likely to change, so I'll name the software. I run bitlbee, so I can IM from my laptop without having to install any extra IM software, and use just an IRC client.

Media player

I have a portable HDD full of music, and some pretty good 2.1 speakers on my desk. These are hooked up to the server, on which I run various utility programs you can find on my code page.

File sharing/downloading

I have a few network shares on the server (notably: /media, so I can share any attached devices), as well as a torrent client and HTTP download manager. The torrents and downloads only run between midnight and 8AM though, as that is when my bandwidth is free.

Utilities

And all the rest: openntpd, sshd, uptimed, etc.

Particularly Handy

There are a couple of things the server does that are particularly handy, such as downloading updates for my laptop: my laptop sends a list of updates to the server through the network share, the server downloads them, and sticks them on the share for my laptop to pick up and move to the pacman cache; and adserver blocking: I download a big list of adservers every month via cron and parse it to generate a blocklist using BIND, so any computer using my server as its main DNS server is (mostly) ad-free when browsing.

Status Script

This is my favourite achievement on the server, a status/administration script written in PHP that can tell you how much bandwidth has been used by individual users of the proxy server, start and stop torrents, edit the DNS blacklist, et cetera. To get an idea of what it does check the source code in github.

There's also a nigh-perpetually outdated screenshot here.

Photos

Photos from the assembly and set-up: