Chris’s Digital Realm

Baldrick is my server, it runs this site (and many others). It is currently colocated in London by 49pence. It’s a Dell PowerEdge SC1425 with the following specs:

• 1 × 2.80GHz Intel Xeon Processor (1MB L2 cache, 800 MHz FSB)
• 1.5 GiB of RAM (DDR2 PC2-3200)
• 2 × Seagate 80GB Hard Disks
• 1U form factor, for cheap colocation

Like most of my other machines, it runs Debian 3.1 (Sarge). It runs a vast amount of software that keeps everything going:

Infrastructure

• Watchdog – Monitors the hardware and reboots the machine should it ever crash.
• Monit – Monitors individual services and restarts them should they die.
• RAID-1 – The two disks run off a RAID-1 mirror, thus any one of them can fail without causing any trouble.
• LVM2 – Allows for trivial partition management.

Databases

• MySQL – Easily the most popular database on the web.
• PostgreSQL – A much more full-featured database system, also Open Source.

Web Server

• Apache 2.0 – The second generation of the most popular HTTP server on the Internet.
• PHP – The PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.
• Cerberus – My own work-in-progress control panel and management system.

Mail Server

• Postfix – A very simple to configure, high performance mail transfer agent.
• Courier IMAP – A very nice IMAP server package, part of the Courier MTA.
• DSPAM – Statistical anti-spam filter.
• Maildrop – Another component of the Courier MTA, for delivering mail to maildirs.
• Mailman – The GNU Mailing List Manager.
• ClamAV – The Clam AntiVirus program.
• Horde IMP – The webmail package I use.

The server has plenty of spare capacity should it be required. There is 20GB of unpartitioned hard disk space, memory can be expanded to 12GiB, and a second CPU could be added should the need arise.

Pictures
I still haven’t seen Baldrick in its rack at Redbus Sovereign House, so here are some pictures of it while I was setting it up: