Wx.Ca Now Brought To You By A Mac Mini
This past weekend, the Wx.Ca server got upgraded. It had been running on a Red Hat / Fedora Core Linux PC since (I think) 2002. That was the second hardware generation. First came an even older and bigger and slower Linux PC. The current one's twin, which was my development server, was getting temperamental and the main server was due for replacement after running 24 hours a day for 7 years.
So both servers, each one bigger than a bread box (nobody remembers bread boxes) have been replaced with one little Mac Mini and a few accessories:
Here we have:
- The Shaw cable modem.
- A small Linksys ethernet 10/100 switch to allow 2 computers to get the Shaw allotted 2 IP addresses.
- An Apple Airport Extreme that serves as a firewall and performs Network Address Translation for the rest of Wx.Ca. It also port forwards HTTP requests to...
- The Mac Mini (previous generation) running a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3 GB of memory (the max that this older generation Mac Mini can address).
- An external Firewire 400 drive for Time Machine backups.
After 2 days, it's working great.
Poking up from the background, you can see that the 5 power bricks with their 5 line cords and 5 device cords take up more space than the active gear.
The conversion from Linux to Mac OS X (Leopard) was very easy. The Mac comes with Java and the Apache web server. I just had to add MySQL for the database, Ploticus for the charts and Apache Tomcat as the Java Servlet container.
I also moved the CVS source code repository from the development Linux box to this Mac Mini. I'll continue to do the Java coding and builds in Eclipse on a MacBook Pro.
I have a Kill-A-Watt to measure the power consumption, but it's not plugged in at the moment. I'm sure the power saving will be substantial. On the next scheduled outage I'll add it in.
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