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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