About us and our website...
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.
Who we are
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...
About the server
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.
Our goals
As I briefly mentioned above we want to build a social media platform. Here is a rough feature list of what we have planned:
- A general purpose forum engine that allows the creation of forums and forum threads
- Registered users and guest users
- Anonymity mode: A mode which allows registered users to post anonymously, even in private threads
- Random contacts: Get to know new people