Site Infrastructure

The Mick's Place site runs on a collection of servers in my home that I maintain. Some are several generations old, one is nearly 10 years old! The magic? Linux and Open Source. The About page describes my Open Source application configuration, but underneath that is Tomcat, PHP, Apache, and MySQL with a bit of PERL and bash shell scripts stitching it together.

My Linux distribution of choice is Fedora Linux. Most of the machines are running Fedora. Having said that, I have played around a bit with both OpenSuSE and Ubuntu and they both are compelling. I may contemplate moving a server or two to Ubuntu just to see how it works.

I have migrated most of the old physical servers to virtual machines running on fewer physical servers. Nearly all of the above is now hosted on KVM/QEMM virtual machines running some version of 64-bit Fedora, and the physical hosts also run 64-bit Fedora. An exception is the database server which is a seperate physical machine that runs Centos and MySQL. This makes sense as disk IO doesn't virtualize well.

All the servers are housed in a specially built server room that is climate controlled and separate from the rest of the house (it's in the attic). I wrote it into the offer on the house and the builder agreed! I was quite happy and it is working out great! It has a separate air conditioning unit and most of the servers are on a UPS. This photo is out of date - I'll add a newer one soon.

Server Room

The house was pre-wired with Cat5e cable that was home-run to one of the upstairs bedroom closets. There is a wall box there that also includes the security mainboard and backup battery, and it was all wired for telephone only. I rewired several of the lines for gigabit Ethernet and put a switch in there. I also have my VoIP phone adapter there that is wired into the phone lines for the house that I left as-is.

Network Wiring Closet

Unfortunately we didn't have the luxury of getting to work on a place that was just framed up like we did in Minnesota. Here, I'm stuck with what the builder put in plus a couple of cable pulls I put in the attic and fished through the walls. I kept the Site Infrastructure page from the old house just in case you would like to see it.

There is a 100Mbit DMZ that has the web server on it that only exists in the server roon, and a Gigabit private network with most everything else. I have a tightly locked down 802.11b/g segment that hangs off the private network, and a separate wireless segment on my firewall that is treated as less secure than the private network and connected devices must be explicitly enabled. My firewall distro (IPCop) provides for that setup on a separate interface.

So there you have it. Proof that old machines can continue in a productive life with a little Linux/OSS loving!