tomkarpik.com

Breathing Some Life Into Things

February 20th, 2009 :: one comment

After much procrastinating, this site is going to start seeing some action in the near future. I’m going to expand/update the WordPress theme I use here, set up a fresh phpBB 3 forum, and design a new template for phpBB 3 that will tie into the WordPress theme.

The most exciting piece of news is that this site (and a few more) are now hosted on my very own dedicated server, being colocated at Digital Forest. My awesome boss is letting me take up some rack space alongside the Neo Era Media servers, and I’ve got my own dedicated Internet IP with reverse DNS. :-)

The server, which I’m calling Icarus, was actually pulled from our rack about two years ago due to stability problems. I played with it at home for a bit and couldn’t find any major issues, so I relegated it to the top of a shelf, where it sat for a long time — until recently.

I talked to my boss about the server a while ago, and asked him if I could call the server mine after doing some upgrades on my dime. He was fine with that, so I bought 2 GB of ECC DDR RAM, two 640 GB SATA drives, a matched pair of Opteron 250’s, and a PCI-X SATA controller card, because the stability problems actually turned out to be related to the onboard SATA controller.

All in all the total cost came out to about $550 for everything, which isn’t too shabby for a pretty speedy 1U box. And yes, of course it’s running FreeBSD.

I know that Digital Forest is actually sitting on four major Internet backbones, so I’ll run a little bandwidth test sometime in the near future. Overcrowded Linux shared hosting is teh suck. I’m glad to have moved up in the pecking order of things.