Monthly Archives: September 2008

Small, personal web servers

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Tiny Mini-ITX web server

Tiny Mini-ITX web server

I recently helped my roommate shop for a small, personal web server.  We wound up basing it on Intel’s Atom platform, and I was amazed at how cheap it was.  The server (pictured above) came up to almost exactly $200, including shipping, and has a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 512MB of Memory, and an 80GB hard drive.  It runs Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition.

The motherboard is a Mini-ITX form factor board, so the whole server is pretty small.  It has a low power consumption, with the Atom CPU using only 4W of electricity.  For anyone looking to host their own web page, the Atom is a great way to do it.  So far, the box has handled everything we’ve thrown at it quite nicely.  It’s running a LAMP server to host a few personal sites.

If you’re willing to spend a bit more (close to $300 for the same specs) you can get the server down even smaller by using a slimmer case and laptop components.

With the cost of hardware dropping, I wonder if we’ll see devices like this mass marketed to the general public.  It’s mainly a matter of making a nice interface for it to easily allow setting up a photo or blog site. Imagine a desktop application that would allow a user to type up a blog post, upload photos, etc., then automatically upload that content to the server.

If anyone’s curious, the hardware we bought is here.  The motherboard is currently out of stock, however, as Intel has released a dual core version.  I’ll update the wishlist when Newegg gets the new board in.

Automatic offsite WordPress backups

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Yesterday, I decided to set up a an automated backup solution for my site here.  Basically, it does an sqldump then sends the dump to another server over SCP.

First, I had to enable SSH login without a password in order for SCP to work in a cronjob.  I followed this howto and it worked perfectly.

Then, I created a backup script to be called by cron:

#!/bin/sh

cd /home/backups/collegegeek

FNAME=collegegeek-`date +%F`.sql

mysqldump –add-drop-table -uroot -pPASSWORDHERE collegegeek > $FNAME
bzip2 $FNAME
rm $FNAME
scp $FNAME.bz2 zach@192.168.1.82:backups/
echo “Nightly Backup Successful: $(date)” >> /home/backups/blogbackup.log

This will also leave a copy on the local server on the /home partition.  Note that /home is on a different physical drive than /var, so if the drive with the SQL database goes down, I should have a local copy as well.

In search of a new project

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With Deluge 1.0 out, the first stable release not based on my original 0.5 code, I’m in the market for a new open source project.  I’d like to start something from scratch, but I’ve been racking my brains looking for a good idea.  I’m trying to follow a similar criteria that I used when I started Deluge:

  • Something that is wanted by the community.
  • Something that will be useful to more than a small subset of users in order to maximize testers.
  • A medium sized desktop application, around the same level of complexity of Deluge (ie, something like Eclipse would be way to big)
  • Something that is either missing on Linux, or that could be better implemented on Linux.

The application will most likely be written using GTK, and I’d like to start experimenting with D as well.

The idea for Deluge came from posts I saw on Linux forums about the lack of a solid GTK+ Linux bittorrent client, which led Alon and I to start hacking on a new client (called gTorrent at the time).  I’ve been looking around on a couple of forums for a similar idea, but I’m coming up with nothing.

If you have an idea, either post a reply here or drop me a line at zach@collegegeek.org.

Update

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I realized that I hadn’t written anything in a while, so I figured I’d post an update. We did lose power last Sunday after the windstorm, and on top of that, a couple of downed trees were completely blocking off Central Ave. We wound up staying on campus late (as late as 1 AM one day) just for the power and internet.

We finally got power back Thursday night at around 9 PM, and cable and internet were back up the next day.

WordPress 2.6.2 and the benefit of changing the Administrator's username

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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.2.  Apparently, there was a problem in 2.6.1 that allowed a user to reset the password for any user, and I’m pretty sure I was hit with it right before I upgraded.  I got an email saying that a new user had registered and then reset their password, using the username ‘admin’.  Fortunately, I’ve modified my site to use an alternate username for the administrative user, so I wasn’t affected by this.

Just a random update

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I feel like typing something…

My hard drive came in, and is now hooked up and formatted on Komodo, giving me over a terabyte of storage to work with.

I’ve been playing with Chrome, and in fact I’m using it right now.  My overall reaction is very positive, and I’m looking forward to a Linux version.  Chrome makes sense both in the way the code is done and the way the user interface is designed.

I’m also currently in the middle of a project for school, which is to create a commandline shell for Minix.  Currently, my shell can output environment variables… woot.

Hardware

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I got my 8800GT a couple of days ago, and my new Western Digital drive should come in today.  I’ve modified my computers page and also added pages for past and future computers.  For Nehalem, I’m thinking a Core i7 800, 4 or 6GB of DDR3, and an X58 motherboard.