About My Server...

My server came into existence in 1999 when I got down to school. Originally using Microsoft's Personal Web Server on Windows 98 Second Edition on my old computer (Cyrix 300 MHz, 64 MB PC100 SDRAM), my server was a simple tool for me to share files with people. Although it may still appear to be nothing more than that, my goal is much greater. To me, my server is a resource for me to learn and build web applications in a practical situation. Many of the items on my pages have been written by me, such as my counter, guestbook, pseudo-blog news, and site-statistics (all are constantly being improved).

After a year using Microsoft IIS, I switched to Apache to accomodate the heavier server load due to the Saturday Night Live section (IIS has hard-coded limits for concurrent requests; a max of 10 connections on Windows 2000 Professional, if I recall correctly). In June of 2001, I added MySQL as the database software to give me some assistance and flexibility with managing the small, yet sometimes annoying tasks which I routinely performed as part of upkeeping the site. An example of the database use would be the main page news along with the 'old news' page.

In early 2004, three years after my switch to Apache, I've taken another large step into the world of open source by migrating the server to Linux. Since I've had a decent amount of experience compiling the server components from scratch on Linux, I was very happy to make the switch. By making the move to Linux, I was able to eliminate several of my custom-written apps because programs already existed for Linux which provided the functionality that I was looking for. This whole switch occurred immediately after I got myself a new computer, allowing me to turn my old machine into a dedicated server. I can access all of my files through Samba, providing a very clean transition.

The front-end of the site relies heavily on PHP and MySQL, with many back-end components written in either Java or C/C++. My ultimate goal is for the site to produce itself as dynamically for each function as possible. This allows me to keep the content updated with near-mindless effort more frequently.

My computer is hosted on a DSL line now, and using a custom ODS connector to cope with the dynamic IP address.

* Because of occasional clock drifting, it may appear that Apache has been running longer than the Linux kernel. I assure you, this is not the case. Just some funny clock drifting.