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So after eating today’s lunch over at Somerset Mall (sorry, The Somerset Collection) we took a walk through the Apple store. Turns out they had a demo Airport Express for $99, so I picked it up for the living room. Not a bad deal, I don’t think, seeing as student price is $119. It’s a little scratched up, but it’ll be tucked behind the stereo, so that doesn’t matter.
Also, all my email has been moved in to nuxx.net and is being accessed via IMAP. I’m still trying to figure out a good mail client to be used from home. Squirrelmail isn’t bad for web-based stuff, but it has two problems. One is absolutely massive CPU utilization when opening a large mailbox, which may be tweakable by either adding an SSL accelerator to the box and/or a Squirrelmail setting to have it cache stuff. The second is that (as far as I’m aware) I can only send email through it using the account which I logged in with.
I’m also wondering if moving the mail to a database instead of the filesystem would make sense. This will be a more drastic change, though, so I’m not so certain I want to do it.
The last idea is to upgrade the mail server, but there’s no reason why a P2-500 (which is what bornslippy.nuxx.net is) can’t push big quantities of IMAP. I think the clients are a problem.
Oh, and yes, I’m looking into using mutt. That’s one of the things on my plate to get working today.
I’d have to concur with the clients being the issue. My mailserver (dual P2-500, 2G RAM) is nowhere near capacity. And to be honest, the majority of it’s current resources are going toward spam elimination and anti-virus rather than actual mail processing.
Part of the problem I’m having is that Squirrelmail (my web-based client) hits the imap server pretty hard. I’m thinking that I can free up some cpu by adding an ssl accelerator to the box. I’ve also just upgraded to the latest release of Squirrelmail, and that seems to help a good bit, too… I turned on server-side sorting, so I think that it’s only downloading the messages it needs as well. So, things are getting somewhere…
Also, I have to ask, how do you have P2-500s? They weren’t actually made, I’ve just got a development sample that has no multiplier lock.
I’ve never been a fan of webmail, so I never bothered to set anything up for that aspect.
As for the proc, it’s a combination of faulty memory (mine) and a typo. The previous incarnation of that box was a dual P2-450 overclocked to 500, and it’s currently a dual P3-500.
Oh, nifty. I bet that’s a fairly snappy machine…
I want to upgrade my box soon, but I’m not sure if I’m going to. A (much) faster CPU would be nice, but I’m having a hard time finding an appropriate board. For now I’m going to try and snag an SSL accelerator which is supported by FreeBSD and see how much help that is. With lots of crpyto(4) being offloaded to a dedicated processor, https should be sped up, and hopefully imaps will be helped, too: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ubsec&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+5.3-RELEASE
I picked up a stack of old VA Linux 2230’s on eBay pretty cheap. Since I was in the process of converting everything to rackmount at the time, it was a great deal.
As for the card, it should help but SSL accelerators are really geared toward large transaction volumes – multiple requests from multiple parties. If the only SSL you’re using is HTTPS for SquirrelMail and IMAPS from a single user (or even just a few users), I’m not sure you’re going to see a significant increase in speed.
But that’s not to say I wouldn’t try it myself if I could come up with a cheap SSL card. It just sounds like a fun project.
Oh, nice… I’ve got a mid-tower colocated locally. The machine can be seen here if you’re interested.
And yeah, I understand about the SSL accelerator, but I think the offloaded rng and such should help a bit. We’ll see… If everything goes as planned I’ll get the card for under US$50, which isn’t too bad for playing around. I’ll let you know after I’ve gotten it… I’m more looking for less CPU when using SSL as opposed to normal http connections.
I guess we’ll just see…
I’ve debated going the co-lo route, since the bandwidth would be cheaper, but there’s just something about having all of my equipment in my office where I can play with it at 3am should I so desire.
These are from before the move a year ago, but most of the hardware is still the same.
Wow, hehe. Man… That’s a lot of stuff there. Lately I’ve tried to go the bit more opposite route and move things out of my office. I’ve got just the G5, this laptop (when I’m home) and monitors in it. The September 2004 pictures here show how that’s set up.
Also, I wasn’t initially going to do colocation myself, but I found a local place that does 250GB of transfer for $50/mo, hosing your own 1U or mid-tower box. They don’t have set access policies, but seem to be flexible to allow you in when need be. I haven’t visited the server since I installed it, and it’s going on 300 days of uptime. I must say that it helps me to be more strict in my change management policies so that things are a bit more planned, to hopefully prevent any sort of outage.
Oh, and the colocation allows me enough bandwidth to host multiple sites. Right now I’ve got 15 domains I’m master for, hosting sites for 14 of those, pushing a bit over 30GB of data in the last month. I figure that’s not bad for the $50/mo… Especially with the bandwidth available.
I noticed that you’ve actually got forward and reverse dns going… What provider do you use which allows that? Also, just FYI, your gallery is a version which has a css problem. Just so you know…
Well, since I moved to a rack/cabinet, it takes up a lot less room, so keeping it in the office isn’t too bad. But I do need to re-design the desk layout so I can make better use of the space.
My upstream is a little local shop that’s basically reselling InterNAP connectivity. Being one hop off most backbones is rather nice, especially since I’ve got about 25 domains that that I’m doing master for and maybe another 5 set up as secondary. Most of them are hideously under-utilized, but at least they’re really good about working with me on config changes.
Of course, the fact that setting up reverse for a /24 is considerably easier than trying to do so for smaller subnets is probably why they were willing to delegate SOA for the reverse zone.
Yeah, I’ve got pl5 sitting in a directory waiting to be installed, but I got busy and forgot about it. I should go do that now while I’m thinking about it.
Just FYI, I’ve found that if you just extract it over the top of your currently gallery directory, everything will work out just fine. Well, unless you’ve made some custom modifications… That’s what I do in order to upgrade all 10 or so domains who have galleries.
Yeah, that’s my preferred method too. Luckily they’ve been really good about not flattening the changes I’ve made to the header and footer files in order to cram the Gallery portion into a table.
Oh, nice… I kinda wish they still released patch files. I also wish there was bundles of the locale files available, but it’s not too bad.
Right now I’m trying to figure out why the output of the jobs run by ‘periodic’ aren’t ending up in my mailbox. Hmm.
Check this out: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=5747933663
Keep your eye out on eBay for similar part numbers. Best I can tell that thing is natively supported under FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) by ubsec(4):
So, with any luck that’ll help take some load off the CPU for some encryption stuff. That, combined with the server-side sorting and threading will (hopefully) make things work a bit better.
IMHO, the place on the other side of the food court has better quiche. Salad Sensations, or whatever it’s called.