[PLUG-TALK] Jetway ION-TOP as Web Server?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 11:58:40AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   This is a hardware question, but I will install Slackware on it.
> 
>   I have a Jetway ION-Top computer with an Intel Atom 330D (dual core) CPU.
> The specs in the users manual do not mention if the Atom is a 32-bit or
> 64-bit processor.
> 
>   Might there be good reason for me to _not_ use this as an in-house
> httpd/ftpd server? I want to re-do our business web site and host it
> locally, and I want to host a multi-client application using a postgres back
> end. There's one client needing this now, but there would not be very heavy
> use of the system; perhaps one or a few data entry logins per day and
> incidental queries and report generation.
> 
> Your thoughts are appreciated,

Stipulate that I have just ranted 50 lines about the many
benefits of offsite virtual hosting at Linode or Rimuhosting.
Unless you need special purpose hardware or very large data
storage, virtual hosting is more reliable, easier, and cheaper.


The machine you suggest has a big power-wasting GPU, and no
fan.  You do not need a display, you do not need a keyboard
or mouse.  You want two and preferably three ethernet ports,
room for a full-sized hard drive, very good cooling, and a
quiet case.  You can access your web server with ssh and X
from your desktop machine.  The server should be located
near the network feed into your house, not heating and
crowding your home office. 

You may need more external bandwidth - web servers can
really get bogged down by spiders.  Baidu, the mainland
China search engine, is really obnoxious in this regard. 
I had to increase the apache memory/process limits just
to handle 40 or 50 simultaneous baidu requests.  I will
move my videos to a third party hosting service Real
Soon Now, to reduce the load further.

You are using dirvish, so you have backup copies of your
hard drive and can restore them to another hard drive
quickly.  Whatever server hardware you choose, you should
have the components handy to rebuild a copy of it in a
few hours, and you should test that rebuild occasionally.
That suggests using components you can find locally.

I manage four servers, two offsite and two inwards-facing,
for two businesses.  The inwards-facing servers are headless,
and firewalled like crazy, doing backups, managing processes,
and containing data I do not want leaking into the wild.  I
also have two three-port ALIX computers (along with a ready
spare) acting as firewalls, VPN, and DNS/DHCP servers,
between the internet and my internal networks.  I am
gathering the materials for a spare server, as backup
for one of the inward facing servers. 

We use moinmoin wiki for internal bulletin boards; that is
where we document procedures, arrange bookmarks, keep shopping
lists, etc.  With a multiport machine, you can serve different
apache content to inside and outside.  This is helpful for
development, and alpha testing new outwards-facing content.




-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993