About This Server

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White Spot Home » About This Server		Updated: January 2, 2005

Motivation

You know how easy it is to lose touch with friends, family, and all the important people who make up your life? Well, it's a connected world now and we no longer have an excuse to let good friendships drift away. The White Spot (North) is my attempt to keep all the people in my life up-to-date on what's going on with me and all of us, any time, even if we can't get together as often as we'd like for reasons of time or distance.

The White Spot diner in Charlottesville, VA was a gathering place for my college buddies and me during some of the best times of my life. I now live north of it, but the name captures the essence of these pages: a place where old and new friends can gather, have a couple of laughs, and keep in touch with each other.

I frequently get asked about my web pages, the WS(N) server, and what I need to get all this up and running. Here's a start.

Hardware

Sun Ultra 10 As of January 2000, the WS(N) server, nat, has been a Sun Microsystems (NASD:SUNW) Ultra^TM 10 workstation, which I purchased at a great employee discount from Sun. To say I'm not a Microsoft fan is a serious understatement and I have been running some form of UNIX^® on almost every personal computer I've ever owned, but I am now a total convert to Apple's Powerbook G4 for all my daily personal computing tasks, in or out of the office. Nevertheless, I would never trust the serving of these pages to anything else but Solaris.

Here are some of nat's specifics:

440MHz UltraSPARC ^TM IIi processor with 2MB of external cache

512MB of memory

Pioneer IDE DVD-RW

160GB of mirrored IDE hard disk space

12GB 8mm tape

Creator3D^TM 24-bit double-buffered graphics

Dual-channel fast/wide UltraSCSI adapter

Software

nat runs the Solaris^TM 9 operating environment, the world's most popular UNIX variant designed specifically for Internet- and web-based applications. Solaris now features the Apache web server, which is the one I use to serve up the pages for wspot.net. Solaris also includes the Washington University FTP daemon, which is powering my anonymous FTP area. Mail through the WS(N) is handled by good old sendmail and my mailing lists are maintained by the Majordomo mailing list system.

I have used three freely available programs to create graphics images and manipulate the photographs on the WS(N): the wonderful GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP); the amazing ImageMagick suite; and the ubiquitous xv. More recently, since getting my first Mac (and loving it), I've been using Adobe Photoshop Elements.

I use strict XHTML 1.1 with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS2) to produce these pages and the on-line XHTML Validator and CSS Validator to make sure that the pages are displayable by as many browsers as possible. HTML Tidy is a handy program to pretty-print the XHTML source and make sure it follows all the rules.

Consequently, the WS(N) web pages look best when viewed by modern, up-to-date web browsers, such as Safari, Netscape 7 or later, Mozilla 1.2 or later, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later.

Safari

Netscape 7 or later

Mozilla 1.2 or later

Firefox

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later

Internet Infrastructure

I'm connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through my DSL connection provided by Covad. Covad resells its services through regional and nationwide ISPs and in my case, that's Speakeasy. Speakeasy provides all the services I need: 24×7 connectivity, three static IP addresses, 1.5M/256K bandwidth with an 80% guarantee, and a very enlightened attitude toward services provided by my server (i.e., do what you want at no extra charge as long as you're not spamming or serving up unsavory content). I've owned the domain name wspot.net, which is registered through easyDNS, since 2002.

Please send questions and comments to webmaster@wspot.net.