Backlog

Since I'm starting this journal several weeks into the project I'm inserting this update to mention include past activities.

1. Decided we had reason to run our own server.
• I think it started because of SSL
  
• The co. is doing a privacy audit - since the laws in Japan have just changed requiring higher standards of customer privacy protection. I thought we'd better use SSL on pages where we collect customer data.
• Our webhost didn't have things set up the way I liked. I thought - if we had our own system and sysadmin I could ask them to set it up just right.
• But we can't have any new staff so I decided I'll learn how to do it myself. How hard can it be?
• Looked into the price of dedicated hosting - its getting cheap.
• But running your own machine off ADSL is even cheaper. Asahi-net offers fixed IP address ADSL for about $50/month.*
2. Collected hardware and connections.
• network - provided by the office.
  
• computer
  
3. Chose OS FreeBSD 5.3
   
4. Install OS
1. 4.9 - I had 4.9 sitting around on disc so I tried it first. It went smoothly enough but I decided why not get the latest. 5.3 just went "stable" recently so why wait.
   
2. 5.3 I had a problem which was identicle to the one described here except that my hardware = CPU: Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron (501.14-MHz 686-class CPU) and the person on the list had: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor (450.13-MHz 586-class CPU)
   

• After an install of 5.3-Release on a freshly formatted drive, I am
  getting loads of calcru errors:
  
  calcru: negative runtime of - usecs for pid  ()
  calcru: runtime went backwards from  usecs to 
  usecs for pid  ()

• the best advice I found came from another place where someone with a similar problem was advised to simply run with ACPI turned off
5. Set up NIC
1. This went smoothly enough - I can't remember any problems. The co. network requires that I use a fixed IP. I just made up an arbitrary host.domain name for the machine since it will not be accessible from the internet.
6. Minimal applications added.
   
1. With the 5.3 install I did not add any packagest or distribution sets. I wanted to be sure that only the bare necessities are on this machine (within reason - ie. I was not going to compile my own kernel)
2. installed sshd (now I do most of my work through a putty window on my other computer which is running a graphical desktop. This makes it more convenient for studying documentation on the web and sometimes cutting and pasting commands into the ssh window.)
7. ftp or ftp-ssl?
8. apache 1.3 or 2.0?
9. ...to be continued