Router, webserver, old and new
Posted on February 16, 2004 @ 10:49 in Tech
So, it's been a bit quiet on the weblog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy... au contraire, mes amis! The semester just started and I'm teaching a course. I'm still a PhD student, so my teaching load is fairly light: only one course and some odd jobs each year. I'd already forgotten again how much energy it takes to get a course up and running, to connect with the students, and get them excited about this class, which they, inevitably, at first view as yet another class, yet another obligation. I've also spend some time upgrading the house LAN, which is what is post is all about... warning, technicalities ahead!
In the first picture you can see the old and the new router/firewall, separated by my old, dusty, but reliable Deskjet 520. At the bottom of the pile is my old Pentium 100 box that runs a tiny, 1.44MB floppy sized Freesco Linux distribution. It has two equally ancient 3Com 509b ISA network cards and all the computers were strung together with COAX cables; speed limit on the local network: 10 Mbps, plenty fast enough for accessing the Internet, pretty slow for regularly backing up files from one computer to the next. On top sits the shiny new router, a Linksys WRT54G, a combined 802.11g wireless access point and four port router/switch/firewall. What's so nice about this little appliance, apart from its wireless and 100 Mbps network functionality, is that it's silent. No fans to cool it, no whirring harddisks, just a couple of blinking LEDs. I've managed to put together a rather quiet computer and now I've eliminated one more source of noise from my room. Finally the noise level inside is lower than whatever sounds filter in from outside. I'm making a vow to always go for the quietest possible computing solution from now on... it makes concentrating on work much easier and at the end of the day, you're not half as tired.
But, the old Pentium is not going out the window! Using the packages available for this tiny Linux distro, I've upgraded the installation to an Apache webserver with PHP, Perl, and MySQL support (see the second picture). I'm working on a website for a small foundation and I have it running with MovableType, but their site requires an aweful lot of templates to run as it should. That's why I'm looking into different content management systems. Having my own little Linux server sitting there is a great for installing an testing all those different systems.
If you don't have a whole lot of Linux experience, I can recommend installing Freesco and the Apache related packages. Because it's such a small distro, it's all very straightforward and even if you have to go hunting through directories to find something, it's all fairly comprehensible. And it just works when you install the packages, unlike the Mandrake installation on my other system. I've managed to install Apache and related packages on a "workstation install," but they don't run when I boot into Mandrake. I'm sure it will work just fine if I fiddle with some configuration files, but I don't have the time to go figure out how to do that right now. So, if you have some tips, I'd appreciate it... meanwhile, I'm pretty happy with my setup. Back to work now...
Comments and Trackbacks
ahhh, wat mooi! Zie je wel hoe veel vorodelen aan dat wireless gedoe kleven? Het is zelfs stiller in huis!
Mijn computer heeft GVD opnieuw de geest gegeven. een of ander kut probleem maakt dat het kreng bevriest wanneer ik er langer dan 5 minuten mee werk. Ik heb het geheugen geruild voor de juiste kloksnelheid en nu weet ik het niet meer. Ik denk dat ik alles uit de computer kast rag wat ik toch niet gebruik (modem, ethernet kaart) en de hele flikkerse boel opnieuw installeer (dat werkte de vorige keer ook goed). Maar ik zal je niet verder lastig vallen met mijn gezeik.
Zo en nu weer aan het werk!
Cheers,
B.
Posted by Bruno Verbeek on February 24, 2004 @ 14:35
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