About This Server

Motivation

You know how easy it is to lose touch with friends, family, and all the important people who make up your life? Well, it's a connected world now and we no longer have an excuse to let good friendships drift away. The White Spot (North) is my attempt to keep all the people in my life up-to-date on what's going on with me and all of us, any time, even if we can't get together as often as we'd like for reasons of time or distance.

The White Spot diner in Charlottesville, VA was a gathering place for my college buddies and me during some of the best times of my life. I now live north of it, but the name captures the essence of these pages: a place where old and new friends can gather, have a couple of laughs, and keep in touch with each other.

I frequently get asked about my web pages, the WS(N) servers, and what I need to get all this up and running. Here's a start.

Hardware

Since mid-2005, the WS(N) server has been a Sun Microsystems (NASD:SUNW) W1100z workstation, replacing the Sun Ultra 10 that had been doing the job so well since 2000. I have been running some form of UNIX^® on almost every personal computer I've ever owned, and I would never trust the serving of these pages to anything else but Solaris.

Here are some specifics about the WS(N) server:

2.4GHz Opteron^TM 150 processor with 1MB of external cache
1GB of memory
Pioneer IDE DVD+RW
300GB of mirrored IDE hard disk space
NVIDIA Quadro FX500 AGP graphics card with 128MB memory

Software

White Spot (North) Software
Operating System:	Sun Solaris 10
Web Server:	Apache
FTP Server:	Washington University FTP
Mail Server:	Sendmail
Mailing Lists:	GNU Mailman
Blogs:	Roller
Graphics and Photos:	Adobe Photoshop Elements
Video:	Apple Final Cut HD
HTML Checker:	HTML Tidy

I use strict XHTML 1.0 with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS2) to produce these pages and the on-line XHTML Validator and CSS Validator to make sure that the pages are displayable by as many browsers as possible.

Consequently, the WS(N) web pages look best when viewed by modern, up-to-date web browsers, such as Safari, Mozilla 1.2 or later, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later.

Safari 2	Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later
Firefox	Mozilla 1.2 or later

Fun Stuff

My server spends most of its time doing nothing, so when it's got some spare time, it participates in the SETI@Home project. SETI@Home ("Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence") is a grid of Internet-connected computers that donates spare compute cycles to look for extraterrestrial life. Every so often, the server downloads some radio telescope data collected from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and starts looking for patterns that might indicate the presence of little green men. If you're interested, you can see how much compute time I've contributed to the project over the years or learn more about SETI@Home.

Internet Infrastructure

I'm connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through my DSL connection provided by Speakeasy. Speakeasy provides all the services I need: 24×7 connectivity, three static IP addresses, 1.5M/256K bandwidth with an 80% guarantee, and a very enlightened attitude toward services provided by my server (i.e., do what you want at no extra charge as long as you're not spamming or serving up unsavory content). I've owned the domain name wspot.net, which is registered through easyDNS, since 2002.