tech.sweetnam.eu

Over at Tiernan’s blog he asks “what’s your setup?” I’ve decided to take him up on his question and although being unemployed for the past two years means my setup is nowhere near as powerful as his, nonetheless it’s not pretty bad either so here we go:

Primary Webserver:
Sun Blade 2000, 2 x 900Mhz UltraSPARC IIIi, 146GB disk space, 2GB RAM running Solaris 10

Second Webserver:
PentiumD 2.8 Ghz, 120GB disk space, 2GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.04.3

Third Webserver:
Pentium IV 3.0Ghz, 80GB disk space, 2GB RAM running Windows Server 2008

Fourth Webserver:
Xeon 2.4Ghz, 76GB disk space, 512MB RAM running Windows Server 2003

Primary Workstation:
PentiumD 2.8 Ghz, 768GB disk space, 3GB RAM, 512MB nVidia QuadroFX4400 running XP

Primary Fileserver:
Pentium IV 2.66Ghz, 500GB disk space, 1GB RAM running Windows Server 2008

E-mail/Groupware server:
Xeon 3.0Ghz, 146GB disk space, 1GB RAM running Ubuntu 6.04LTS and Zimbra

E-mail Gateway:
Celeron 2ghz, 40GB disk space, 1GB RAM running CentOS 5.0. Physical server converted from virtual appliance.

Reverse Proxy Server:
Pentium III 700Mhz, 40GB disk space, 512MB RAM running OpenBSD 4.5 and Squid 2.7

Outgoing Proxy server:
Sun Netra T1-120, 500Mhz UltraSPARC II, 36GB disk space, 2GB RAM running Solaris 10 and Squid 2.7

Primary Laptop:
Apple MacBook, 2.16Ghz Core2 Duo, 120GB disk space, 2GB RAM running OS X 10.5

Secondary Laptop:
Toshiba, 1.2Ghz Celeron, 40GB disk space, 384MB RAM running Ubuntu 9.10 for WiFi testing.

I have a few more odds and ends that are only occasionally in use. I have two more Sun Netra T1s, An HP 9000, L2000 (rp5420) and a couple of Pentium IIIs that are occasionally used for testing.

At the moment I would kill for a Core i7 setup but sadly funds are low at the moment and will be for the foreseeable future unfortunately!

It’s been absolutely ages since I last wrote here and I had been meaning to do so for some time. Since my last entry I have been tinkering away with my setup as I do on a regular basis and plenty of things have changed here on the back end. I suppose I will begin with my my connection and move up the chain from there.

First up is a new router. I picked up a nice Cisco 837 for a very reasonable price. I had a bit of fiddling to get it up and running with eircom broadband but I got there in the end and I have documented the procedure over on my wiki.

Next up is my reverse proxy. It is still running on the same hardware but I decided to move from Linux over to OpenBSD. My primary reason for this is that I was getting sick and tired of Linux iptables. In addition I concluded that Squids performance wasn’t optimal either. A move to OpenBSD seems to have resolved both those issues for me. PF on BSD is very configurable and easy to understand as well. Needless to say I have documented my experiences with PF over on my wiki also.

I’ve also gotten my hands on some new hardware. Well new hardware to me that is. I picked up three Sun Netra T1 servers, a Dell PowerEdge 1750 and two Symantec 5420 Firewall appliances.

So far I have been busy setting up the three Netras. They don’t have CD-ROM drives or display adapters so I had to install them over the network which was a process that was actually relatively simple. However it was only simple in that I already have a couple of other Sun machines here one of which I was able to use as an install server. Of course I have this process documented on my wiki also.

I haven’t decided what I will use the Netras for yet. One of them seems to have CPU problems and has been cannabilised to increase the specs. of the other two. They have 500Mhz UltraSparc IIe CPUs so by todays standards are not at all that powerful but they do draw very little power, certainly less than a Pentium IV machine so I may set them up as file servers. Initially I was hoping to install OpenBSD on one of them to use as my reverse proxy but unfortunately an OpenBSD network install does not seem to be as straight forward as Solaris.

The Poweredge 1750 I had hoped to set up as a webserver running either IIS or Apache. Unfortunately it only has 512MB of RAM so until I get some more for it that rules out Server 2008. However it is incredibly loud and that rules out keeping it running in my computer room. I am currently planning on setting up a dedicated computer room as it were in another part of the house so check back here for update on that.

I’ve had a busy few days patching upgrading and moving sites around.

The two biggest changes were upgrading my mail server from Ubuntu 6.06 to 8.04 which went very smooth indeed and moving all sites hosted on my Fedora powered Dell Poweredge over to Solaris 10 running on one of my Sun machines.

As well as the above I also moved my reverse proxy from an elderly Pentium III 550 to a much more modern and powerful P4 3Ghz machine. I’ve also moved my outgoing proxy onto the second of my Sun Machines which is now running the latest version of Squid which at the time of writing this is 3.0 STABLE4. All my windows machines have also been patched and updated and my last remaining XP machine is now eagerly awaiting the release of service pack 3 which is being released tomorrow. Come to think of it I’ve just realised that my XP machine has been running the preview release of SP3 since it was released some time back (v.3264). No doubt I’m going to have a nightmare task ahead in installing the proper release.

But getting back to the Dell Poweredge and why I moved everything over to one of the Suns. I have a task in mind for the Poweredge but this task involves Windows Server. I actually have a licensed version of Windows Server 2003 for it so I have to say goodbye to Fedora