Guus Bosman

For those of you interested in the technology behind Guus Bosman.NL, here's the story on the new server.

Last week my parents gave me some old hardware, a Pentium and a 486. Pretty old computers, but perhaps strong enough to be servers. Coincidentally, Friday the original server (opa) broke down, and I couldn't reboot it. Therefore I was forced in a way to speed up the transition to a new server. This weekend I've been working on it. First, I had to see if the hardware was okay -- it turned out to work fine, especially the Pentium.

Second, I had to choose an operating system. I looked at Redhat (required 32 MB, too much) and Slackware (to install it you need 7 diskettes -- and I hate diskettes). The OS I choose was OpenBSD, it comes on a single floppy and considers security very important.
Installation of OpenBSD was really smooth. I set up my Windows 2000 machine as a HTTP proxy (so not to worry about installing NAT software on the w2k computer), and the Pentium was installed using a single diskette and this proxy. Apache came pre-installed; fetching PHP and MySQL was easy.

In the mean time, I found some information about how to upgrade my ADSL modem to a real router... quite interesting! My modem now serves as a DHCP server, DNS server (local), NAT router and firewall... It made working with the OpenBSD PC a lot easier; no need to install PPTP software anymore.

Currently, Guus Bosman.nl is still quite slow (16 MB is just too little for both PHP and MySQL). However, I still have some memory chips in my parents' place I think... If I install these performance should increase dramatically. Also I'm looking at a separate MySQL server. The 486 has some conflicts (IRQ) that I just couldn't solve with OpenBSD. I have even been thinking on installing Windows on it but I don't have a 95 version, and the newer versions are too big. Anyway; in a maybe a week or so I hope to see my parents again, and then the party can begin ;)