My tax refund was electronically deposited on Friday, so I decided to spend some of it on a new server to host my website and despammify & deviriify my e-mail. Currently I’m running a couple of VERY OLD, noisy boxes to power my website and e-mail. Currently this site is being served to you on a Celeron 466 w/ 192 MB of RAM (which I first built in 1999), and my e-mail is ran on a K6-450 w/ 128 MB (cheap intarweb special circa 2000). I think my cell phone is more powerful than these two doorstops, and certainly much quieter. And of course both of these boxes are running my favorite server OS, FreeBSD. Actually the mail server has been running the same install of FreeBSD for over 4 years now without any hiccups:


[booms@shadow booms]$ uname -a
FreeBSD shadow.booms.net 4.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE #0: Sat Jan 13 12:48:44 MST 2001 booms@shadow.booms.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/LEETBOOMSDOTNET i386

I think that’s pretty amazing.

Here are the basic specs on the new hotness:

  • Intel Pentium4 processor, 520, 2.8GHz, 1MB Cache, 800MHz FSB
  • Memory: 1G DDR2, 533MHz, 2X512 Single Ranked DIMMs
  • 80GB, Serial ATA, 1 inch, 7.2K RPM, Hard Drive

That should be more than plenty to handle the amount of traffic I get, and I really didn’t spend much at all on it. I’m pretty sure I’ll end-up going with FreeBSD as usual, but I can be swayed (read as: convince me to use Linux, Linux geeks). I’ll have to research server software and all of that again, but at this time I’ll install Apache w/ PHP & Tomcat as usual, and switch to using Postfix for SMTP. I need to see if Spam Assassin is still the way to go to get rid of spam, and if so I’ll integrate that into Postfix.

I’d like to think about installing Postgres, but I’m sure it will be easier to do the standard install of MySQL in the long run. I won’t have much time to mess around with setting it up once it gets here unfortunately being that I’ll be starting a Java class at the time.

It’s going to be so nice to trim the number of active machines at the house down to two quiet ones. I suppose I’ll have to eBay most of the old boxes I have sitting around (yeah, so lets not get into how many computers I have now…)