About this server
Today (Thursday January 9th 2003) I replaced the UPS of my webserver. I've traded in my old (early 1998) APC BackUPS Pro 420 -- which I used for my main computer I use for most things -- for a rack mounted APC Powerstack 450. This because the battery of my 1998 UPS began to give trouble, and the UPS -- a (late 2000) APC BackUPS Pro 420, donated to me -- used in for the web server was not rack mounted. It was balanced diagonally between the front and back on the latch. Now this BackUPS Pro powers my main computer, and the brand new PowerStack 450 is proudly mounted in the top cabinet of my clean and controlled environment 19" rack.
The machine origionally running this webserver was an older HP Vectra Pentium 90Mhz with 32Mb EDO RAM. Not must after I setup this machine I was donated a half depth 19" rack mount cabinet. Because this cabinet is ment to be used to stored network switches a normal rack mounted PC is about twice to deep! So with my mechanical background I reworked a PC miditower into a half depth rackmounted PC. The hard part where the mounting bays for the disks. I located a new motherboard with a small enough formfactor to fit in and used the components from the old HP Vectra P90.
After running this setup a while I was donated an 128Mb SDRAM memory card and a Pentium 133. Since the machine runs Linux it has a plethora of speed for a webserver. However the machine including ASDL modem, firewall, and UPS really crowed the 19" cabinated. When ITsec (the company I work for) was planning on trowing away a not so complete 19" telecom equipment cabinet (the wallplate was missing leaving a large hole of 60x70 cm.) I was very happy to receive it. I have had a new 2.5mm sheet steel backplate made that fills up the hole. I removed all the component from my other 19" cabinet and made one hole in t the of it, and another in the bottom of this new cabinet. With a couple of bolts and nuts, and a fair amount of ceiling tube, I mounted to two together to create one large cabinet with a bottom and a top section. The webserver is now in this lower section, the UPS, cable modem, and firewall are in the top section. Two large (120mm) speed controlled PAPST fans create the nessacerry over-reassure and cool the whoe thing down. A third 80mm fan cools down the disks. A couple of carbon and microwave filters filter the incomming air free of dust and other materials.
Only a couple of weeks before I traded in my old UPS for a rack mountable, I received an Pentium 233MXX, out went the Pentium 133 to make the gap between motherboard, memory and processor close up. The last upgrade possible for this motherboard is to add another 128Mb SDRAM card and to upgrade to a AMD K5 of IBM processor. The last is not so wanted as the first, or not wanted at all actually.
Some people (mostly the ones either not having run any web server at all, or the ones who only run Windows servers running IIS) might think only a years old Pentium 233MMx with only 128Mb ram? Thats way too slow! But on the contrarry! 99.4" of the time the CPU is in sleep mode and around 60Mb of RAM is used as buffers and cache. So the memory could be a little larger to compensate for some large maintanance tasks (3Mb is actually unused at all, and 0Mb swap.) Running Apache in Multithreaded mode on Linux does not need a lot only for serving html files and some pictures over my ASDL connection would require a 486 33Mhz or so (actually have run a webserver on a 10mbit line on a 386 16Mhz without much difference to the multi processor HP-UX machine next to it.) This Pentium 233MMX has no problem at all with it, even not with the couple of the domains I host which run dynamicaaly generated content using PHP4 with data from a MySQL database (running on this same machine.)
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