hmm, running my server at night with the door closed still might not be the best decision. :/ in just a few hours, like 4 or 5 hours, it elevated my room to uncomfortable levels and disrupted my sleep while I was practically naked over the covers (just undies). I’m naturally hot so not good. I don’t have to do anything to sweat, it just happens. anyway, I need a better solution.

I realize it’s an enterprise grade server but it sits on a box in my room and I need to be able to sleep and leave it running overnight if I wanted to. At the moment, I power it down at night and work on it from another room.

So I bought some fans and plan to hopefully slow them down enough to where I could leave the server running and not disturb my sleep and not overheat any components. My main concern will be the raid card because when I pulled all the fans out, everything seemed to run cool over the course of a few minutes but the raid card would exceed 150°F with the cover off but with the fans running it would cool down to around 80-90°F, close to the temperature of everything else.

My Server came in Last week and I had some time to play with it. I looked it over a bit and found a place to put it so I can boot it up. Took a few minutes to learn the multiple bios menus. It has one for the main bios, network config, raid card, iDRAC6, and even a thing to update firmware of everything on it. All before the OS even boots.

So yesterday I bought a server, like an actual server capable of being installed in a rack. A Dell Poweredge R710 with dual Intel Xeon E5640 cpus, 24GB RAM, 2x 146gb 10k HDDs. It has upgrade potentials in all those areas but that’s at a later date.

The idea for this is for me to get my hands on a cheap server to get a real world sense of what’s inside, to see how it goes together, and play with random software. It will become a virtual lab server. I’ll boot it up occasionally to run whatever software I’m looking at at the time during my free time. I want to play with enterprise grade software within a virtual world. I figured this would be cheaper than just getting a few optiplexes and toss some OS them and set up a simple network. Just one optiplex was going for about or a bit more than just this one server and wouldn’t be powerful enough do a lab themselves. I need to be able to run 3 or 4 VMs with several GBs of ram each and my current computers just can’t cope with that.

A few days ago, I joined a website that teaches IT related stuff. It has videos and virtual labs for all kinds of things. I’m using it for Network+ and while some of it kinda puts me to sleep, it’s educational. They have a coupon right now for 30% off for the lifetime of your account. I picked the standard account for like $40/mo with the coupon.

So Today’s project consists of putting entire sites on a secure connection.

My dev server has a few sites I host for myself that eventually get uploaded when ready, like this blog for example. The VM contains apache and php but no mysql because I didn’t want mysql running on the webdev vm. External to the VM, there are two LAMP servers running WordPress and silverstripe for experimenting. Normally, this isn’t an issue but I wanted to add SSL and learn how it all fits as well as making the sites available on a private domain for the SSL to work.

I hate Web Design, it’s time consuming and exhausting trying to find what broke, where it broke, and how to fix it. I can sit here and chase a problem all day and still not accomplish anything. It’s so annoying. Is it just me or does it effect many or all new developers? If I try to study code, I fall asleep or become incredibly lost.

My problem comes in when something doesn’t quite work out right and I’m left spending hours troubleshooting and trying to find what’s wrong. Things aren’t always verbose enough for me to understand the problem, sometimes, I don’t get an error. It just simply fails and that’s anything computer related.

Step 1: Obtain the fastest, yet cheapest, computer you can find.
Step 2: Load your server software.
Step 3: Config software.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!

Nah I’m just messing with you…

So, you wanna host a website, eh? Well, it’s really not that difficult. It just sounds that way from a non-technical prospective. No worries, I’ll try to explain it. I’ll explain my method and perhaps offer up a “easier” route.

My method consists of 3 separate, independent hosts.

• Domain Host
• DNS Host
• Web Host

Today, I am going to upgrade my laptop’s HDD to a SSD and unleash hidden performance. :)

What I need

• The laptop
• A SSD
• A USB 3 to SATA 3 interface
• Cloning Software