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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
- This week's featured script: cgimon.pl
- Apache HTTP Server Project: http://www.apache.org
- MkLinux: http://www.mklinux.apple.com
- Distributed Computing Project: http://www.distributed.net
Author: Doug Steinwand
Date: [09/3097]
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