About this site

Why

After deciding to have internet access from home, I though I should do a bit more then just use it to download movies, well I mean, just surf the web. I then decided to by a new box so my whole family could just surft the web without out me not being with the company laptop. That left me with an old boxes (see below) which I thought was nice to get some technical experiences with. So thats why I decided to be selfhosting, even if this gives my adience a bit slower web experience.

Infrastructure

This site was started on a 7 year old pentium 100MHz system with whe following hardware:

To get things work as lean as possible I removed my 14K4 modem, Adaptect 1505AE scsi adapter and soundblaster compatible card.

Recently it was upgraded to a $40 Compaq celleron 450MHz, 64Mb internal memory and not sure about the disk, think its around 6Gb. This is much results in much better performance to maintain the site. On upload/download I could not notice any difference.

My incoming line is currently an adsl line (isp xs4all) with 256Kbps down and 64Kbps up speed. This is upgraded for free by the provider mid november 2003 to 320Kbps down and 128Kbps up. This will increase the download perception by you by a factor 2! And currently its 1600Kbps down and 320Kbps up.. Still the same price...

Some routers are between my incoming line and this webserver. On the same segment some MSWin systems are running.

FreeBSD

I started off with FreeBSD 5.0. Although this is not widely used I went for FreeBSD because of its known stability. The only problems I had sofar were outof swp space (on the old box). This caused the OS to remove some random processes from memory, which included the webserver. The out of memory was caused by the AWStats module consuming too much memory. After dealing with the crontab for that, it never happened again.

The last time the system was down was because a swap of the servers from the 100Mhz to the 400Mhz. Now I've said that, it will probably crash when I save this document...

Domain

I got the domain from hostway.com for just about $6.95 a year. This is a real bargain although it might mean I need to get some experience myselves with the technology. They will only forward the website so I arranged DNS using zoneedit.com which is free if you don't have too many dns queries. You can get a free trial up to 5 zones and 200MB trafic which is about1,000,000 dns queries.

Syndication

There are a number of XML feeds available. If you'd like to syndicate this site and prefer to read it via your own XML feed aggregator, you can find the RSS feeds here:

I have no clue why I need so many different ones but I will soon remove the RSS 1.00 feed.

Photography

I do some photography for hobby. I mainly -- read only -- use Nikon equipment at the moment and extremely happy with the photo quality. I started with a Nikon F50 SLR and 35-70mm lens and after the first holiday -- andd before going to Egypt -- had to buy an 80-200mm lens and lateron a 24mm f/2.8. Just before digital boomed I upgraded to a Nikon F80 and the excellent 85mm f/1.8. I went digital with the Nikon Coolpix 5700. The sales men told me I would never use my SLRs again -- and he was right! The Coolpix serves me very well although I'm now thinking of having something more portable -- did someone say Nikon Coolpix S1 or did I hear FujiFilm F11??

Blog code

B9 d t+ k- s u- f- i- o x-- e l- c-

Fonts

I've applied a number of fonts.

FF Meta for the jancology.com logo type.

For the content I used fonts which are generally available on the various operating systems. Lucida Grande for the headings on Mac OS-X. First I used Lucida sans but that rendered awful on windows so I switched to helvetica/verdana.

For text content I went with Georgia which is generally available on windows and mac.

More

There is always more... but now now.