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Peer into Your Web Server

I've recently been busy setting up a web new server in a computer lab on campus. Like most colleges, it seems that there isn't much money kicking around, so this "new server" really isn't all that new. Well, actually it's an old Macintosh PowerPC 7100 with a 601 PowerPC processor running at a heart-stopping 66 Mhz. The interesting part isn't the hardware - it's the software. Most people associate the Macintosh and the PowerPC processor with the beautiful Macintosh Operating System and its easy-to-use graphical user interface. Well, this server doesn't run the MacOS.

Welcome to Linux country.

In the past, I've been disappointed with MacOS-based web servers, having tried both WebStar andNetPresenz. Even with Open Transport 1.1 they have never worked very well in my opinion.  A good web server needs a good network operating system -- some flavor of Unix. A group of developers at Apple have been porting the Linux operating system to the Macintosh. (Linux is a freely-available version of the Unix operating system.) The current release of MkLinux (as it's called) has been available for more than 6 months. As with most colleges, there's an ample supply of network bandwidth available, so downloading more than 80 megabytes worth of installation files took only minutes. I installed MkLinux, compiled and installed the Apache web server, and less than two hours later I had a new web server. I'd highly recommend this operating system to anyone with a "spare" PowerPC Macintosh and 500 megabytes of disk space. And, having at least 32 megabytes of RAM wouldn't hurt, either. You'll be able to find more information about MkLinux at http://www.mklinux.apple.com
 
After setting up the new web server, I wanted to check on its speed and current status. To do that, I wrote a small Perl script to show the current users, processes and disk space. To do a quick check on processor speed, I used the RC5 client application. This small program, available for virtually every operating system known to mankind, is designed to search for the correct key in the RSA-Secret Key challenge. There are 2^56 (72,057,594,037,927,936) possible keys, and using the client program, the task of finding the correct one has been distributed among thousands of computers connected via the Internet. Look at http://www.distributed.net for more information.

This week's script will show you available disk space and a list of users currently logged in. If you're running the RC5 client program, you'll be able to see a quick report on its current status.

Take a look at a Sample Screen.

References

Author: Doug Steinwand
Date: [09/3097]

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