One of the things I haven’t mentioned before is the exciting history of onpaws.com. The progress has steadily slid from lame, slow hardware to unreliable hardware to the current oldie…not to even mention the constant drop in hosting quality. However, many things about it have been free, and even educational. The benefits significantly outweighed the cost, so I still win. :)
Someday when I get money to spend on this kind of thing, I’ll get real hosting for onpaws.com. But in the meantime, I can rest happy knowing I’ve spent a total of ~$57 on the hardware running this website, and $0 on hosting. Not too shabby for a midnight side project.
Here is your length warning; this is a really long post. Like the rest of onpaws.com, I’m writing for myself first and everyone else second.
Long ago on a cold winter late night journey in the hallways of CSH, I found a bunch of junked old hardware lying around unused. Somebody had given up on their motherboard because they couldn’t get it to recognize HDs, which I fixed by removing/replacing the CMOS battery. I found some old RAM in a pile, a discarded network card from another room, and got a new 160 GB Seagate to boot from. Everything got slapped together in an old beige case.For my toils, I ended up with a 700 MHz Pentium III with 256 MB of RAM. Not bad for a web server, eh? It ran on CSH’s network, enjoying that nice uncapped university upload speed, until I returned to school. A CSH member requested I move the server to my new apartment, which meant a significant drop in upload speed. Boo #1.This server ran the site until last October when the memory controller suddenly died a sad, slow death. onpaws.com would randomly crash, and nothing about it was reproducible. Boo #2. Thus, the hard drive moved to my roomates unused extra computer, which as I recall was an old school Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM. Sweet upgrade…but short lived. My roomates main computer chose this moment to die, which necessitated him using the one hosting onpaws.com. Boo #3!
I then started my internship with the big software company everyone loves to hate, and moving across the country meant getting settled in an entirely new place. onpaws.com was put on hold while I got moved into a new house with new roomates and circumstances. This is why there has been such a long downtime. Sorry to my dedicated readers. (Do I have any?)
Currently, sweet new hardware turns the onpaws.com gear:
Pentium 1 133 MHz
64 MB RAM
1 GB HD IDE
833 MB HD IDE
Ethernet+BNC+something weird card
SoundBlaster 16
Generic Modem
I found this hot-hot-hot piece of computer ass next to a dumpster on the day I moved out of my corporate sponsored apartment. It was running an old copy of Windows 98 with some weird assortment of dance software that didn’t work. Desperate to get any kind of working solution I sucked it up and took her home. Plus, my masochist-in-residence enjoys playing with this stuff.
Getting anything interesting installed on this speed demon proved to be an adventure. I’ve never had to install an OS on a computer from the pre El Torito days. (That means the computer couldn’t boot from a CD – it’s floppy, HD, or the highway, baby.) Since nobody had a floppy diskette in the house, and I was definitely not going to actually plunk down cash for one, I had to transplant the HD into my existing desktop.
The stupid tower has half a motherboard inside and the other half on a case door. Incredibly awkward construction, unfriendly to the enterprising sort (me). Not to even mention the sharp edges.
Anyway, I managed to switch the drive and get a Debian base going on it via my El Torito-capable desktop. While I’m a Gentoo luser this box certainly doesn’t have the oomph for compiling any source, so this is my first Debian install. I’m sorry to say I’m not a huge fan so far, but its mostly because I’m used to Gentoo’s little quirks. Packages definitely install noticeably faster on Debian though. I swapped the drive back once Debian base did its restart, crossed my fingers, and success! Surprisingly, the kernel booted; I only had to modprobe the right networking driver and we were in business.
The next part was actually getting it to serve pages. I was going to go LAMP + WordPress like before, but after all was installed, the 5-6 second front page load just wasn’t cutting it. I’m using something a lot more lightweight: lighttpd+fastcgi+php5-cgi+mysql5+Nucleus.
Page loads are down to about 3 seconds here, and while they probably won’t get any better, but they’re a ton better than they could have been.
The future of onpaws.com involves dedicated hosting, but this requires dedicated $. Things will eventually get better, so please bear with me as the changes happen.