Smokin'  

Named after a dog that was on some dog-show I had in the background while setting the machine up, "Smokin'" isn't anything special.  In fact it is rather 0ld Sk00l, a mere PIII 650 with a mere 350mb ram.  But, it will be a perfect image server that should lighten the load on ansel, the main server.  If anybody has a faster PentiumIII lying around that they dont need, let me know. According to intel it should take upto a 1Ghz chip, PGA370.  Likewise, if anybody has some old SDAM they dont need, she could use that too.  The ram specs get tricky, so contact me to see if yours  might work.

Ansel, too, takes a PGA370 PIII, but I dont know how fast it can go.  It's a dell motherboard and they dont give you much info.  Right now, it's a P3 1ghz even though the specs say it only supports a 750mhz.  So, I dont know!

I was quick to get it out the door and into the rack, so the only pic I have is the one taken by the gentleman I bought it from.

Well, is it a lot faster?

You might have noticed a lot of downtime yesterday.  I did some upgrades to the operating system on both the database server and the web server.  Since it is about a 30 minute walk to the colo facility and I don't care for late-night emergencies, I did some pretty extensive testing before I left.  Sorry about the downtime, but I hope some of the changes will speed things up.

I'm eying some old-sk00l servers on craigslist like this one: 1U Rackable Systems Server P3 700 MHz - $100.  I'm gonna see that guy in about an hour - maybe we'll get a new image server by the end of this weekend?

I'd like to get the PowerEdge on the top of this page as it would solve pretty much all photographica's problems for about a year, but right now I lack the cool $1000 to buy it.

I've just ordered 512mb more ram for the photographica's webserver which will bump it to a whopping 1gig.  In theory, it should work out of the box.  In.  Theory.  It's a bit older of a machine (in fact, it was made in 1998) so there is question as to if it will work at all.

For the chronic refreshers, that is why the server was down for 30 minutes.  I had to pull it from its cozy little rack and see exactly what was inside.

For those that care, here is what is inside:

ansel.xlan.org: aka Photographica/Artclick Webserver

• 1u Dell Poweredge 350
  
• P3 750mhz /w 440bx intel chipset
  
• 512mb ecc/registered PC100 ram
  
• Two old ghetto 70 gig IDE hard drives on a (software) RAID1 array.
  
• SuSE 9.2 Linux
  
• Apache 1.3.7 /w mod_perl & mod_ssl
  
• Photographica's codebase (2.8 megs of pure perl code)
  
• Memcached

strider.xlan.org: aka Photographica Database Server

• 4u, whitebox, old school case (arg)
  
• p4 2ghz
  
• 512mb ram
  
• two 120gig IDE drives on a raid1 array (also software)
  
• SuSE 9.2 Linux
  
• mySQL 5
  
• Also running subversion for version control and FogBugz for issue tracking.

Facility

• colo'd with my hosting company, XLAN, which is nestled into a half rack in Colo Centers on the 18th floor of the Westin Building in Downtown Seattle.
  
• 100mbit internet connection (about 100 times faster then your typical high speed internet such as DSL)
  
• All the bells & whistles that come with colo: generator, battery, AC, beefy guys with shotguns (they really aren't that beefy though)

Someday I might take pictures, but I suspect that such an act might be frowned upon for security purposes.

Comming Soon to a website near you. The new, almost dedicated Photographica web server.

• Antect 1U Rackmount Case /w 250W p4 ready power supply
• Pentium III 833 & 133FSB on an asus motherboard
• Software RAID ala 2 IBM 14gb Deskstar 7200rpm ide hard drives
• 1gb Crucial PC133 Memory

Software: Redhat Linux 8.0, Apache+mod_perl+mod_ssl, proftpd (soon to be at port 21!).

What does this mean? A quicker page load, and way more room to grow.