Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I've been working on configuring a development web server for toolbarn.com over the past couple of days. Was it a quad processor, quad core system with terabytes of RAM and storage? Perhaps a Sun T-2000 with more threads than you can shake a stick at? Not a chance. I'm using old hardware to simulate our web servers under a heavier load. That, and it was sitting here not being used. I commissioned a Dell PowerEdge 2300 with 768MB of RAM, dual PIII 600's, and 3 8GB SCSI drives in Software Raid 5. Not exactly high-end stuff that we'd want to run anything serious on, but for developing a website, it'll be just fine. We also set up a PhpWiki for keeping track of development notes internally among the team in IT, and we'll be doing lots of documentation over the next little while. Oh, what fun. I remembered, after getting 403 permission denied errors on all folders, that Apache requires some special tuning of the selinux parameters. Note to self: find this post ne...

For many developers, running a simple web server on a windows box would simplify things a lot. I've been asked many times how to do that best. Well, my answer has been the same for a while now: use Indigo . Indigo Perl installs Apache as a service with PHP and Perl support. You can install this right to your Windows workstation and be off and running in a few minutes. No more uploading a file and saying "Oops" when there's a typo. Install it and view your site on your own PC before you FTP the files up to your web server. I've installed this on a few Windows servers as well for some Intranet apps. It sure beats manually configuring things to run Perl, since that's the language I program almost everything in. Yep, I'm old school, but that's mostly linked to my past as a Unix sysadmin. Wow... that makes me really old school.

I actually did a quick PHP 301 redirect the other day on a server that I couldn't create an htaccess file on. Rather cool that php does that so easily. It has me inspired to learn more php with as easily as it actually worked (once I remembered to begin with I guess maybe this ol' dawg can learn new trix.

We're trying to upgrade to a load balanced, fully redundant web serving platform now. What we currently have was a $3000 server about 30 months ago, so it's time to look at upgrades. I don't usually like Dell, but their prices are something else. As we're getting ready to upgrade our servers, I happened across Dell's website and checked what they had for a deal at the moment. We ended up getting a few at stupid prices - stupid meaning very low for what we're getting. Base Model The base model on these machines is a 1U rackmount 2.8GHz/2MB Cache Xeon with 1GB RAM, 2 x GB ethernet ports and an 80GB HDD. Nothing too impressive. Free Upgrade To start making it seem a little nicer, they offered a FREE second processor. Customization We added in 7GB more RAM, another drive (mirroring is a good thing) and a few other odds and ends including the 3 year service plan. Since it's Dell, we'll probably need that. ;-) Price Reduction Since it was over $2700, Dell took...