Michaelsoft Systems

My Server

About 9 years ago, I decided to create my own site. I signed up with tripod
(a free but ad based service) to host my website. The ads which were present on every page and they proved to be nuisances, especially since the site was framed. I remained with them for 6 months, then I researched setting up my own webserver. Eventually, I found KF Webserver, a free program which enabled me to use my desktop to host the site. The only problem with this was that when I shut down my computer, the site would go down with it making my site unaccessible. So I needed a better solution.

Another issue was that since I have a DSL connection, my IP is dynamic (never the same). So, because of this I have to use a Dynamic DNS service. Currently I am using a service called DynDNS, which allows my domain to always point to my current IP. I love using this service and use it for all the sites I host.

I was able to acquire a new computer for myself, and decided to setup my old one as a dedicated server. It was only 233MHz which ran Windows XP. This was, at the time, sufficient enough.

As time went by, I felt the need for a faster server, so I managed to get a 600MHz from a relative, and instead of Windows XP, I installed Windows 2003 Standard Server. I decided on Windows 2003 Server mostly because it's an actual server OS, which is more stable when running for long periods.

It wasn't until I was in college and was learning ASP, that I needed an http server that supported it. So I reluctantly switched over to IIS 6, which came with Windows 2003. My server supports the following: ASP, PHP, PERL, HTML, and SQL. I also decided to setup the server for Remote Access (VPN). I decided on a VPN server so I can access all of my network resources when I'm not at home.

I was able to acquire an IBM Netfinity 5600 server for free, so now instead of a standard desktop I am using a real server system. Also my Linksys router started to cause some connection problems so a friend suggested I should try Smoothwall, which is an open source firewall based on the Linux operating system. I figured I'd give it an shot and I loved it. It's a very powerful setup and is very customizable.

So now instead of this site passing through a Linksys router before it makes it’s way to you, it passes through a computer running SmoothWall.

Websites

My server hosts the following sites:

Server Pictures

Folding@Home

I also donate idle CPU cycles to Folding@Home which is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases.