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Class of 1979 Lanier High School
Austin, Texas
What’s the purpose of this web site? Why not just use reunion.com or classmates.com? How is this web site financed? Who runs this web site? A word from Richard... I wanted to set up a reunion web site back in 1999 for the 20th anniversary reunion but I got busy tracking down missing alumni and didn’t get around to it. Since I was on board for the 25th anniversary reunion from the start, I had the opportunity to create this web site in time for it to be useful. The web site went live on January 26, 2004, and the bulletin board was added on February 17th. Thanks to Ann (McCaffrey) Mechler for suggesting the bulletin board idea. I figure there’s a 1-percent share of our population that might wonder what hardware and software was used in the production of this web site, so —yielding to this ground-swell of public demand— here’s the setup for this web site. Current Web Site Configuration
The current server hosting the Lanier79 web site is a white-box machine named Tiffin. Located in Austin, Texas, Tiffin was built for around $650 (not including hard drives) and assembled, configured, tested, and deployed over a weekend. Except for the RAM, which was purchased over the Internet, all of the server’s components were purchased from the Fry’s store in north Austin. Click here to see a photograph of the inside of Tiffin server, as it is configured today. Two primary considerations during the construction of Tiffin were reliability and quietness. The Sonata II case was well regarded for its quietness; the included power supply is quiet and soft silicon grommets are used throughout. I hadn't given the CPU cooling system much thought but discovered an excellent Zalman CPU cooling fan. I keep it running at its slowest speed and its base is still barely warm to the touch. Tiffin’s primary hard drive is composed of a pair of Seagate 160-GB hard drives mirrored to each other; one is an IDE hard drive and the other is SATA. I did consider purchasing a RAID PCI card to control the drives but I settled on using the hard drive mirroring software built into Tiffin’s operating system: You’ll never know the difference. If one of the hard drives fails, the Lanier79 web site will remain up and running and I’ll be notified of the problem by email. (This actually happened in September 2006.) Tiffin’s operating system is a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux called CentOS Linux. The CentOS project is not a one-man-show like the WBEL OS used on Tiffin’s predecessor, Kayak. CentOS has much better support and more timely security updates than WBEL could provide.
Tiffin server is located in a tiny server closet under the stairs in my home. While it does have a keyboard, mouse, and little video monitor connected to it, they are seldom used. When I need to work on it, I have many options but I usually connect to it remotely by using an encrypted command-line connection (SSH) or, much less often, by using a full graphical mode by way of a software package called “Virtual Network Computing” (VNC). The VNC client program that I use on my Mac is called Chicken of the VNC; the VNC server program running on Tiffin is the one built into CentOS. When I’m messing around with the MySQL database I almost always use phpMyAdmin, a web-based graphical interface. Finally, I use a free backup program called rsnapshot to automatically backup Tiffin’s 160-GB mirrored primary hard drive RAID array to a 300-GB backup hard drive every night. Although I code HTML/CSS by hand using a commercial text editor, every other facet of this web site is produced entirely with free software. The operating system, Linux, is free. The web server, Apache, is free. The graphics editing program I use nowadays, The GIMP, is free. Free doesn’t mean worthless, though. There is no better web server at any price than Apache and The GIMP can do much of what Adobe Photoshop can do. Website Configuration from November 2004 to August 2005
As a server, it now runs White Box Enterprise Linux, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is located in a tiny server closet under the stairs in my home. When I need to work on it, I connect to it remotely by using a command-line terminal program, by forwarding X11 GUI sessions via SSH, by using a web browser and Webmin or phpMyAdmin, or by using VNC. My desktop computer is a Mac running OS X so, for copying or editing files, I usually connect to the server by using NFS, Unix’s network file sharing system. It’s similar AppleShare or NetBEUI. Nice thing is that on my client machines I can work with the files as though they are on my local workstation. I use SCP or SFTP to transfer files—just for onesies and twosies. Finally, I use cron and rsync to automatically backup the website to another computer on my network every night. Although I code HTML/CSS by hand using a commercial text editor, every other facet of this web site is produced entirely with free software. The operating system, Linux, is free. The web server, Apache, is free. The graphics editing program I use nowadays, The GIMP, is free. Free doesn’t mean worthless, though. There is no better web server at any price than Apache and The GIMP can do much of what Adobe Photoshop can do, too. Website Configuration from January 2004 to November 2004
From January until July 2004, this server lived on my fireplace hearth; from after my home remodel in July 2004 until November, it lived in the small server closet under the stairs in my home. When I needed to work on it, I connected to it remotely by using a command-line terminal program, by forwarding X11 GUI sessions via SSH, by using a web browser with Webmin or phpMyAdmin. To access files on the server, I usually connected from a remote machine by using NFS. I used SCP or SFTP to transfer files—just for onesies and twosies. Finally, I used cron and rsync to automatically backup the website to another computer on my network every night. Although I coded HTML/CSS by hand using a commercial text editor but edited the graphics with The GIMP, a free open-source Photoshop-like program. |
This Macintosh G3 Server was actually a 1997-era minitower workstation into which Apple slapped ultra-wide SCSI and 10/100 Ethernet cards, then sold as a server; it was an excellent machine, though. It ran Yellow Dog Linux, which was a version of Red Hat Linux compiled for the PowerPC microprocessor.