TidBITS Hardware and Software

TidBITS Hardware and Software

People often ask us what we use to run the various TidBITS servers. Listed below are the main pieces of hardware and software we use. Oh, and if you were wondering, we name our computers after species of penguins.

Emperor

The machine emperor.tidbits.com, also known as www.tidbits.com and just tidbits.com, is our main server. It does basically everything for us now.

Dual 1.33 GHz Xserve G4 - Emperor runs on a normal dual 1.33 GHz Xserve G4 (2 GB of RAM). Emperor is still running Mac OS X Server 10.2.8, which came with it and handles the load just fine, so we haven't had any reason to upgrade.

Web Crossing - The server software that powers all of our Internet services is Web Crossing, from the company of the same name. Web Crossing can do just about anything, since it backs up its built-in Web, FTP, email, and NNTP service with plug-ins that add mailing lists (also accessible via the Web and NNTP), RSS support, weblogs, wikis, and much more. A lot of this is possible becuase at its heart, Web Crossing includes a high-performance object-oriented database and not one but two programming languages for creating dynamic sites. Web Crossing is the software that Apple uses to host their discussions.

Apple Remote Desktop 2 - Since Emperor lives at digital.forest, we administer it remotely using Apple Remote Desktop. It's not perfect for remote administration, but it works pretty well in situations where we don't want to ssh in from afar and use the command line.

ftp.tidbits.com

The machine ftp.tidbits.com is located at and maintained by Northwest Nexus. Its purpose in life is to act as a mirror of the Info-Mac Archive and store back issues of TidBITS in setext format, along with some other miscellaneous files. ftp.tidbits.com is the only server we run that's not a Mac. We have two rules about hardware for TidBITS. First, if possible, run on a Mac. Second, if someone volunteers to do the work for us, let them use whatever hardware they want.

Pentium 150 - Northwest Nexus has always run ftp.tidbits.com for us, and when they asked that we buy a machine to relieve the load on their machine, we asked what to buy. A 90 MHz Pentium with 32 MB of RAM and a 1 GB hard disk was the answer, although we subsequently traded that machine to a friend who replaced it with a 150 MHz Pentium with some amount of RAM and much larger hard disk. And before you ask, it's never even seen Windows.

Linux - To be honest, all I know about ftp.tidbits.com's software setup is that it runs Linux. I believe it uses wu-ftpd as an FTP server and Perl5 for running the mirror script that synchronizes files with the main Info-Mac Archive.

Special thanks to digital.forest, our Web and mailing list host.