GFK's Palace

baba

The site that you're reading this on is hosted on a small virtual private server called baba that is rented from JVDS. It's located somewhere in California. I'm not sure about the hardware it is running on, but from JVDS's description it's a dual Xeon, 2 GB of RAM and hardware RAID1. It's running FreeBSD with these public services:

• DNS: tinydns
• SMTP: qpsmtpd + qmail
• HTTP: Apache + PHP

ali

My main server is called ali, it's located in my basement, and is not directly accessible from the Internet. The hardware is upgraded quite often, but at the last update, it had an AMD Athlon XP2000+ CPU running at 1.3GHz on an ASUS A7V266-C motherboard. It has 512MB of RAM and 80GB of hard disk in a software RAID 1 configuration. The two hard drives are on two separate IDE controllers, one on the motherboard (vt8233a driver) and the other on a PCI controller (Sil680 driver). The boot partition is located on two 256MB compact flashs mounted as hardware RAID 1 using a DupliDisk device. In addition to the CPU and power supply fans, it has two additional fans, a standard 80 mm fan in the front bottom of the case that sucks cold air in -- yes, they only had fans with blue leds in them -- and a Twin Turbo fan that blows the hot air out on front top of the case. Being in the basement, the room temperature is always between 15°C and 20°C. It's running Debian with these private services:

• DNS: tinydns + dnscache
• SMTP: qmail-smtp + qmail + spamassassin
• HTTP: Apache + PHP
• IMAP: dovecot
• FTP: vsftpd
• DHCP: ISC DHCPD
• Backup: BackupPC
• Monitoring: Nagios

baba acts as a private relay to ali through a VPN. If my home connection or ali goes down, baba will queue the messages until ali comes back up. I love and would recommend most of these programs. qmail, tinydns and dnscache are made by prof. Dan Bernstein and are fanstastic, truly the best for the job, despite some "political" issues associated with them and Bernstein. dovecut and vsftpd are pretty awesome too and I beleive that they have been inspired by Bernstein's work. qpsmtpd is a mix qmail and perl, which are pretty much at both ends of the software design spectrum, but despite this -- I would even say because of this -- the results are very good. Nagios is not a very elegant program, and is confusing to use, but it does the job well. The only one that I would not recommend is ISC DHCPD, while it has never failed on me, I have a pretty bad prejudice against anything made by ISC. I looked for an alternative but couldn't find a satisfying one, and since I don't have any evidence that DHCPD is bad, I'm sticking with it for the moment. If you know a good replacement for it, don't hesitate to leave a comment.