- Hello! I am Jan, the server owner and I write this about us page on behalf of my team members.
- We are a group of students hosting a variety of services on an old server that I found on the sidewalk.
- These services provide the necessary foundation to host a few school projects.
-
- - From left to right: Ilja, Jakob, Jan [me], and Erik -
-- We are in the process of finishing school and our last semester in computer science is a project of our choice. - Our main project is a social media platform but we are hosting some other projects as well. Turns out, we are better at - general server management and providing web space for others than actual software development... -
-
- - The server at its current place in the basement -
-
- The server is a 2006 Dell PowerEdge [whatever number goes here] featuring the 2.66 GHz socket 771 equivalent of some
- Intel Core 2 Quad which was considered powerful back then (I guess?). Memory wise, the system has to offer the incredible
- amount of four GiB ECC DDR2 RAM which do not quite fulfill the performance and capacity requirements of
- most real world applications today but are plenty to host some two or three files on a web server.
- Basically, that thing is *s l o w* but more than enough for my private internet connection.
- Guess what, there might have been a reason why it was thrown out by its previous owners.
- As for storage, the server came with three enterprise grade Dell branded Western Digitals (one of which since died) and I threw
- in the SSD I pulled from my old laptop as a boot disk. Another laptop hard drive was given to me by a friend but there are
- no free S-ATA connectors left. [If someone at our school wants to donate their old drive controller expansion card, feel
- free to approach me or one of my team mates. You’ll be the hero of the week and you will be given credit here.]
- Oh, btw: It is worth mentioning the fan. Yes, only one fan (plus the one in the power supply). Before the server was moved
- to the basement it was the loudest device in the kitchen, easily capable of exceeding the noise level of my 15 year old
- fridge twice.
-
- Okay. That should have given you a rough overview of the hardware. Now, let’s talk software.
- We currently run Ubuntu Server with a custom installation capable of doing GUI stuff as well but we rarely use that.
- The best use I found so far is to access internal status web pages via OpenSSH with X forwarding and Firefox.
- The server came with an installation of Windowze Server 2003 but we had no login credentials and who uses Microsoft
- products anyways? [BTW: The drives were filled with personal data of the employees. To all enterprises: PleAze WIPe
- THe DaTa Off All SERvERS YOU EVeR THrow OUt. You do not want to be in the place former NCIX employees found themselves in
- a few years ago.]
- Apart from that, there is not much to say here except for the fact that Ubuntu has become worse over the time I used it and
- I’d not choose it again. It is just what I was (and still am) most familiar with.
-
- As I briefly mentioned above we want to build a social media platform. Here is a rough feature list of what we have - planned: -
- -
+ Hello! I am Jan, the server owner and I write this about us page on behalf of my team members.
+ We are a group of students hosting a variety of services on an old server that I found on the sidewalk.
+ These services provide the necessary foundation to host a few school projects.
+
+ + From left to right: Ilja, Jakob, Jan [me], and Erik +
++ We are in the process of finishing school and our last semester in computer science is a project of our choice. + Our main project is a social media platform but we are hosting some other projects as well. Turns out, we are better at + general server management and providing web space for others than actual software development... +
+
+ + The server at its current place in the basement +
+
+ The server is a 2006 Dell PowerEdge [whatever number goes here] featuring the 2.66 GHz socket 771 equivalent of some
+ Intel Core 2 Quad which was considered powerful back then (I guess?). Memory wise, the system has to offer the incredible
+ amount of four GiB ECC DDR2 RAM which do not quite fulfill the performance and capacity requirements of
+ most real world applications today but are plenty to host some two or three files on a web server.
+ Basically, that thing is *s l o w* but more than enough for my private internet connection.
+ Guess what, there might have been a reason why it was thrown out by its previous owners.
+ As for storage, the server came with three enterprise grade Dell branded Western Digitals (one of which since died) and I threw
+ in the SSD I pulled from my old laptop as a boot disk. Another laptop hard drive was given to me by a friend but there are
+ no free S-ATA connectors left. [If someone at our school wants to donate their old drive controller expansion card, feel
+ free to approach me or one of my team mates. You’ll be the hero of the week and you will be given credit here.]
+ Oh, btw: It is worth mentioning the fan. Yes, only one fan (plus the one in the power supply). Before the server was moved
+ to the basement it was the loudest device in the kitchen, easily capable of exceeding the noise level of my 15 year old
+ fridge twice.
+
+ Okay. That should have given you a rough overview of the hardware. Now, let’s talk software.
+ We currently run Ubuntu Server with a custom installation capable of doing GUI stuff as well but we rarely use that.
+ The best use I found so far is to access internal status web pages via OpenSSH with X forwarding and Firefox.
+ The server came with an installation of Windowze Server 2003 but we had no login credentials and who uses Microsoft
+ products anyways? [BTW: The drives were filled with personal data of the employees. To all enterprises: PleAze WIPe
+ THe DaTa Off All SERvERS YOU EVeR THrow OUt. You do not want to be in the place former NCIX employees found themselves in
+ a few years ago.]
+ Apart from that, there is not much to say here except for the fact that Ubuntu has become worse over the time I used it and
+ I’d not choose it again. It is just what I was (and still am) most familiar with.
+
+ As I briefly mentioned above we want to build a social media platform. Here is a rough feature list of what we have + planned: +
+ +