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
   

My first Server Project

I've decided to learn something about running a server by setting one up in the office. If all goes well I hope to migrate our website off of the shared hosting and onto my own machine which will run on an empty desk near mine. This will actually save some money since we are being grossly overcharged by the hosting co. The real reason I'm doing this though is of course because I hope to learn something.

I have an old machine sitting around. I'll use it first. If we need something more powerful I'll request it after I've at least got things working with this one.

hardware:

• CPU: Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron (501.14-MHz 686-class CPU)
• HDD: 9787MB [19885/16/63]
• NIC: RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX

platform:

• I decided to install FreeBSD 5.3
  

I determined that I wanted to go with a BSD since our shared hosting server was running FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p28 (VKERN). I had heard of NetBSD and OpenBSD too. My decision to go with FreeBSD was based primarily on the quality of their documentation.

• www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html

TM

TM stands for "task master" which is a mechanic in a game I like to play whereby a player can improve skills just by attempting to use them.

Attempting to use skills that I don't have is what I'm all about.