kalpol.com in its present form is the reincarnation of the old jjmode web site, dating from 1995. kalpol.com was registered in 1997, and hosted by DigitalChainSaw. When they became too expensive, it was moved to ValueWeb for a while. When we finally got DSL in our neighborhood, I wanted it but to offset the cost I decided to run my own web server. When I began, I knew very little about Unix, and I figured that a project of this sort would teach me quite a bit. Needless to say, I was well in over my head, but after many belated discoveries, as of late 2001, kalpol.com was hosted on a Compaq Pentium 100 with 64MB of memory originally running Debian Linux 2.2.16 (Corel distribution). I liked that computer because it was quiet - the old Pentiums just used a heat sink, so only one fan in the power supply was running. That computer was retired and I gave it to a friend of mine after putting Windows NT on it.
07.16.02
[I built another server in early 2002, tinuviel, from
spare parts and a steel 386 case. It originally had a Tyan motherboard with a Pentium 100 and a 10GB hard disk. The monitor I scrounged
was an ancient heavy CRT that got ridiculously hot, and if you looked through the grill you could see the glowing red tube.]
The server has now been updated to a Pentium 133 (!!!) and 64MB of memory,
and software upgraded to SuSE Linux v7.2
running Apache and qmail.
01.15.03
Tinuviel has taken a well-deserved retirement. Someone gave me an old Compaq
Presario, 475mhz, and I found enough memory to get it up to 112MB. 12GB
hard disk came with it. Now running SuSE Linux v7.2
01.20.03
The DirecTV broadband unit is going out of business, and I am forced to switch DSL service to Southwestern Bell since they're the only other provider here. I am not happy about this, but I'll manage. I am now using a dynamic IP address, with a cron script that checks hourly to see if it has changed. If so, it emails me and I make the change in my DNS server. This is not as tedious as it sounds, and the IP address doesn't change too often.
03.31.03
I have installed TMDA to cut down on the increasing spam problems. I have had my email address now for five or six years and even though I've been careful, the spam is rising steadily, up to about 10 messages a day (a lot, for me). TMDA seems to be working fairly well - there were a few minor snags inherent in implementing a whitelist. The most obvious one is what to do with emails sent by legitimate senders who do not look for replies (i.e., an Ebay bid confirmation email). Also, it's slightly annoying that I cannot stop spam from reaching my server at all.
05.04.04
The server has set a personal uptime record - 252 days! Not too shabby with the DSL going out occasionally and the dogs tripping over cables. I have also changed DNS servers to Zoneedit and set up an automatically updating script - no more manual DNS entry. MySQL and PHP are installed now as well.
01.19.05
The old Compaq Presario was retired in July 2004 after nearly a year of uptime and my sister took it to school. My old desktop ithilien took its place. Specs are now 750mhz, 512MB memory, and a 3Ware 7xxx controller with a four 80GB disk RAID 5 array giving me 240GB of usable storage. I have switched from SuSE to Gentoo with mixed results, and lately I have updated qmail with qmail-scanner (using ClamAV, F-Prot, Spamassassin 3.0, Vipul's Razor, and Pyzor), which so far is doing an excellent job at filtering mail. The URL blacklisting in SA 3.0 is great! One of my big goals was to have spam rejected outright at the SMTP level instead of just quarantined, and with the st patch to qmail-scanner, this was accomplished. The downside is that the amount of spam I get is causing a little server load, but nothing terrible.
03.27.05
Here are some more server details along with upgrades today:
AMD Athlon 750mhz now running Gentoo Linux (2.6.11)
Gigabyte GA-71XE motherboard
640MB PC100 SDRAM
3ware Escalade 7xxx PATA RAID.
3 Maxtor and one Hitachi 80GB hard drives in RAID-5 array, 240GB usable. JFS file system on root partition.
Lite-on LNE100TX Ethernet card.
SiS 86C326 5598/6326 8MB VGA card.
Toshiba XM-6202B CD-ROM.
420 watt power supply.
APC Back-UPS RS 800VA
Seven or eight fans :(
Kernel configuration for this system is very easy (all the hardware (most of which was scrounged from the parts cabinet) is supported in the 2.6 kernel), and it has been very stable with the exception of some lockups that I believe I traced to the old UPS, which was unable to carry the load during brownouts. Thus the new UPS.
06.16.05
While home sick this week, I made some changes and improvements. OpenSSH is installed now. The UPS has eliminated the occasional lockups - after I set it up and installed apcupsd it reported odd mini-outages occurring every morning about 8:30 for three seconds or so. No more problems now, and apcupsd also has this nice web-based status tool. Last week after an update of qmail, everything crashed and I spent a couple of days tracking the problem down to a problem with the Gentoo ebuild. That was annoying but everything is working well now.
02.11.07
Massive changes taking place since last August or so, I'll try to catch up. Ithilien generates a lot of heat and noise, and I had been plannng various ways to reduce at least the heat being dumped into the house. (It was nice in the winter, but we don't have much winter here.) At the same time, I had been thinking about building a computer to run MythTV, to use as a DVR. Since that computer had to be on all the time to record shows, the obvious solution was to move the web and email server there, and leave the main file service to ithilien. So gandalf came into being, running SuSE 10.1 and built from lots of parts and some nice stuff donated by my dad:
Setup was quite easy using these instructions. I had to add xv_attr to get rid of the blue line problem,
and add a line to start the transcoding daemon, but everything else pretty much just worked. I finally bailed out
of qmail since it was being absolutely patched to death, and started using Exim. This was rather a steep learning curve
but everything is working now. Ithilien is left off if not being used (and our power usage has decreased noticeably). When it's on, I can stream music from it
to the MythTV box. Next up is hooking up the surround sound. The Sound Blaster Live! card in gandalf is just a placeholder
until I dig up an adapter for digital sound. I bought an RCA RT2500 amp from craigslist and it works quite well with my old JBL 8216A
speakers for left and right, and the JBL Northridge N24 II speakers for rear channels. I still need a subwoofer
and a center speaker (saving up for a JBL EC35, seems like a good one).
I also took the old APC Back-UPS 200 with bad batteries and found replacement batteries at Fry's for it. I'm using it now just for the DSL modem
and router. The router I replaced some time back with a Linksys WRT54G (I dug on the shelf at Fry's until I found a V4 at the back, behind all the V5s) running
DD-WRT.
Now for the really fun part. I had enough bits left over for one more computer, which has 10.2 and MythTV installed and is in the bedroom on the TV there. I can stream video recorded on the DVR to the bedroom. It generally works OK but since all the computers except earendil and ithilien are wireless, the signal is not good with the computers being in cabinets etc. Low signal means low bandwidth and sometimes video playback in the bedroom skips. So I may just run some cable for them.
Lastly I installed Ubuntu Edgy on earendil dual-booting with XP and I quite like it. Here's the hardware specs just for reference:
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3200+
768MB PC3200
Shuttle AN35N with nForce chipset
40GB Maxtor and 40GB Western Digital drives
eVGA Nvidia Geforce FX 5500 256MB (works well with Ubuntu Edgy with binary Nvidia drivers)
Dual layer DVD-RW drive
I'm not sure if my hardware just can't handle it, or maybe it's just the video card, but in Windows, playing F.E.A.R
wasn't great. I had everything turned as low as possible before it played smoothly. I think it's probably memory + video card.
05.31.07
I had some problems with gandalf so I backed things up and installed Suse 10.2, and everything seems to work a little better now. While doing that I installed a DVD-RW drive, card reader, and a Turtle Beach Riviera sound card with an optical output so I can use the surround sound with digital TV once I get a digital TV card for it. I also got a Seagate 500GB external drive and I'm experimenting with automated backups using Amanda. What I'd like to do eventually is have gandalf wake up ithilien (where the big drive is, since ithilien has the most data) and then ithilien will wake up earendil and cirdan in turn and back up everyone to the external drive (or two). Lastly I upgraded earendil to Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), works great. I am more and more pleased with it as time goes by and it looks like it's starting to get noticed as a usable desktop distribution of Linux.06.20.07
I finally got a optical cable for the Turtle Beach card. I installed the alsa tools package and fiddled with it a little and finally got it working. The sound is much better, and the amplifier automatically switches to Pro Logic mode when listening to internet radio which is nice. The hiss and hum is gone as well. The card setup was fairly simple - in Yast I added it and then started the alsamixer to turn up the line in. I had to set the output to spdif in the mixer and MythTV, but I think that was about it. No .asoundrc file was needed, I believe, but your mileage may vary.01/01/08
New year, new server. The foray into digital television with a pcHDTV HD-5500 card ended rather quickly when gandalf couldn't handle it. I built celeborn to replace it:I installed the 64-bit edition of Suse 10.3, Myth TV, and moved everything else from the old server. It worked just fine, except I've lost the remote the PVR-350 had - I may try installing that card along with it just for the remote. The TV works fine, I haven't tested recording yet.
The grid icons were made by scanning a grate cover from the PQC room at Hitachi.
The background on several pages is the autoalignment screen from the MAX880 at Hitachi, one of my projects.
The "walking particle" logo is a silicon particle on a cross-section of a 4mb memory chip, taken by me on the S-900 around 1996.
The hand belongs to Lien Le, and was scanned in the PQC room (clean room, hence the glove).
The pie icons on the index page are from Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, by Aphex Twin.