Thinking of setting up a webserver

[antsct]

Hello everyone.

I have an older PC just left in perfect condtion doing nothing. I'm thinking of adding it to my wireless network by adding a wireless network card to it and running the apache http server on it for saving files onto the internet and hosting websites that I have made. Basically I know how to set it up fine it just I have one concern. When running a webserver it's best to leave the PC running on ALL the time. The problem is, this will really push up the electricity bill due to always being on. Ofcourse I wont' have a monitor, keyboard or mouse for it (all remote desktop) but is there some soft of power saving feature in Windows XP Pro to save power of the computer?

The specs are:

AMD K62 533MHz
320mb ram (will probably upgrade to 512 later on)
Onboard 8mb Graphics
8Gb harddrive (will proabaly upgrade later on but is still plenty of space)
Windows XP Pro SP2 (will run Apache Web Server)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thankyou.

 

[bob4432]

i just leave my test machine on "full" all the time 24/7x365. yes it doe heat up the room a bit and probably raises the electricity, but not too much....i need to invest in a kill-o-watt to really know what this thing will cost me.

does your isp block port 80?

 

[antsct]

Nah I don't think Port 80 is blocked. I ran apache on my laptop and then opened Port 80 on my router and I could then acess the server from another computer.

 

[bob4432]

was the computer you accessed it form outside your lan? did you access it via a 196.168.x.x, 10.0.x.x ip or something else?

 

[vegetation]

Well, there's no power savings available to make any difference. You could shut down the drive but then whenver someone accesses your site, there will be a noticeable delay in the request -- enough so that the person will close the browser and think your site sucks.

I would highly advise you to host your files on a commercial site. It's inexpensive and you don't have to worry about your electric costs.

 

[antsct]

Originally posted by: bob4432
was the computer you accessed it form outside your lan? did you access it via a 196.168.x.x, 10.0.x.x ip or something else?

Actually yeah it was, I tried it on a network PC and it worked. Got a couple firends to try and it didn't. Why is that?

 

[antsct]

OK I think it IS because my ISP has blocked port 80. I changed it to 8080 and now it works fine. Is that a good port to use or is there another that is reccommended?
Thanks.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: antsct
OK I think it IS because my ISP has blocked port 80. I changed it to 8080 and now it works fine. Is that a good port to use or is there another that is reccommended?
Thanks.

basically any port can be used as long as it normally is not used by another program. i am not sure about 8080, but i am pretty sure any port other than 80 will require a hxxp://xx.xx.xx.xx:8080

but there are ways around that too. just go to no-ip.com and sign up for a couple of free dynamic dns names, use one to give out to your friends, and then have it reference another which would be the one with the port #.

you give friends hxxp://test.sytes.net and that name is listed as a forwarder in the no-ip setup, which it forwards to your second address which could be hxxp://test2.sytes.net:8080. you can even buy a real domain name and have it reference a no-ip setup. if this is convaluted, go to the no-ip.com site and it will make sense

 

[natto fire]

Originally posted by: antsct
The specs are:

AMD K62 533MHz
320mb ram (will probably upgrade to 512 later on)
Onboard 8mb Graphics
8Gb harddrive (will proabaly upgrade later on but is still plenty of space)
Windows XP Pro SP2 (will run Apache Web Server)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thankyou.

Running this comp 24x7 without a monitor is about the equivalent of having a 75-100 watt light bulb on 24x7. Unless you have ridiculously high energy costs this should only be about $.25 a day. Since there are quite a few web hosting places that offer services (albeit limited) for $8 a month or less, it might actually be more feasible to rent space on one of those servers. Not to mention they will have higher bandwidth than you can offer from your home connection. As far as power saving, you already mentioned the #1 way to save energy while running a computer (running without a monitor), anything else would be negligible, especially considering a web server needs to be active 24/7. Standby is about the only other way to save significant amounts of energy, but is not really an option if you want your site to be available all the time. That system would take long enough to come out of standby that any potential hit would just give up before the request is fulfilled.

 

[antsct]

Ok thanks alot for the help guys! Your great.

By the way could you explain to me how bandwidth works from a home webserver? Does it add to your downloads limit?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: antsct
Ok thanks alot for the help guys! Your great.

By the way could you explain to me how bandwidth works from a home webserver? Does it add to your downloads limit?

download and upload bandwidth are seperate. usually you will get much higher bandwidth at the home becaue the local isps don't want you to run servers out of your home. my bandwidth is 4Mb/s down and 1/2Mb/s up, but don't let that fool you. unless your website is extremely heavy graphics, a 512Kb/s (or ~ 60KB/s) up connection works fine for serving up quite a few pages a sec. the thing is is that you wont have a lot of people hitting the exact same items or even using the bandwidth at the same time. people will come to the site and your webserver will upload the page to them as fast as it can and then the server will not have to send anything else to them until they click on another page on your site. in the mean time others have hit the site too, and again the same thing happens.

if your site is heavy graphics, you can always store just the html on your webserver and then link to the pics stored somewhere like filefarmer.

take my bf2 ram usage site in my sig, the html is hosted from my home server, so i think the index.html page is 11KB, but each pic is large, like 80+KB but they are on another server i rent that has a fast connection (over 200KB/s). looking over my logs when 190 people have hit that site in 1 day, my total upload for just the html was only 1.6MB, span this over the course of 24hrs and you can see that it came up quick for everybody.

even the smf forum test in my sig is totally hosted from home and it comes up pretty quick.

here is another one from home as i am messing around with different cms programs - http://wcms.sytes.net:6583/, probably comes in pretty quick for you, atleast after the first page, because your browser will cache the pics, and then when you go to another page that has the same pics, your browser will get them off of your computers cache, thus only loading up new content.

hope this helps and answers your questions , if not drop another one here and i will answer to the best of my knowledge.

one last thing, my home server is a xp2000 w/ 512MB of ram machine running win2krpo and it has apache 2.x, php 4.x, mysql 4.x, perl, zend and i test about 10-20 sites on it at any given time and there is never any cpu power issues.

 

[antsct]

Awesome mate thanks for the help! If I have any troubles I'll be sure to come back here. I just have one last question.

What exactly is php, myysql and perl used for? Also zend, what's that?

Thanks again.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: antsct
Awesome mate thanks for the help! If I have any troubles I'll be sure to come back here. I just have one last question.

What exactly is php, myysql and perl used for? Also zend, what's that?

Thanks again.

php is a scripting language - www.php.net that is very popular for all types of web scripts. bulletin boards, content management systems, dynamic websites, all kinds of scritps are created with it. look at www.hotscripts.com under php

mysql is a sql database, which is a decent, fast, has free versions, db that a lot of php programs will need on the backend. www.mysql.com

perl - another scripting language - www.perl.com / www.activeperl.com

zend - in a nutshell, an optimizer for php scripts, although i haven't learned php, i installed this because a script i did install needed it - www.zend.com

 

[Some1ne]

Running this comp 24x7 without a monitor is about the equivalent of having a 75-100 watt light bulb on 24x7. Unless you have ridiculously high energy costs this should only be about $.25 a day.

Exactly. PC's really do not use that much energy (or I guess another way to look at it is incandescent lighting uses an excessive amount of energy for what it does), and a system that old really isn't going to use much power, especially since it has onboard graphics and not a dedicated solution, and also because the CPU will essentially be idle the entire time. With no monitor, it will use *maybe* 100W at the very most (and probably actually closer to the 50W to 75W range in practice).

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Some1ne

Running this comp 24x7 without a monitor is about the equivalent of having a 75-100 watt light bulb on 24x7. Unless you have ridiculously high energy costs this should only be about $.25 a day.

Exactly. PC's really do not use that much energy (or I guess another way to look at it is incandescent lighting uses an excessive amount of energy for what it does), and a system that old really isn't going to use much power, especially since it has onboard graphics and not a dedicated solution, and also because the CPU will essentially be idle the entire time. With no monitor, it will use *maybe* 100W at the very most (and probably actually closer to the 50W to 75W range in practice).

not that it uses a lot or will add up, but the older ones were not as effiecient, look at the new amd venice cpus vs just the barton cores, or even the mt turion series... quite a bit more effiencient with V in the 1.2 and lower ranges...

 

[antsct]

Hey everyone sorry to bring up an 'old' thread but I just have one more question. I am thinking about purchasing and 80gb hard drive for it because it's only a few $ more than 40gb. Anyway, because it is an old PC, would an 80gb drive work in it or would I need some sort of connector/converter? I think the old PC uses something called UDMA ?

 

[antsct]

Originally posted by: antsct
Hey everyone sorry to bring up an 'old' thread but I just have one more question. I am thinking about purchasing and 80gb hard drive for it because it's only a few $ more than 40gb. Anyway, because it is an old PC, would an 80gb drive work in it or would I need some sort of connector/converter? I think the old PC uses something called UDMA ?

Please I need to know.
Thanks

 

[phaxmohdem]

Yup it should, I run 80Gig's in my test rig (AMD K6-2 450) all the time, I've run 200Gig drives in it actually with no problem. Sometimes, the BIOS will not autodetect it though.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: Some1ne

Running this comp 24x7 without a monitor is about the equivalent of having a 75-100 watt light bulb on 24x7. Unless you have ridiculously high energy costs this should only be about $.25 a day.

Exactly. PC's really do not use that much energy (or I guess another way to look at it is incandescent lighting uses an excessive amount of energy for what it does), and a system that old really isn't going to use much power, especially since it has onboard graphics and not a dedicated solution, and also because the CPU will essentially be idle the entire time. With no monitor, it will use *maybe* 100W at the very most (and probably actually closer to the 50W to 75W range in practice).

not that it uses a lot or will add up, but the older ones were not as effiecient, look at the new amd venice cpus vs just the barton cores, or even the mt turion series... quite a bit more effiencient with V in the 1.2 and lower ranges...

Well, those are still the same basic core.
A64 CPU's have a max TDP of 89W, more likely around 55-65 for a 2 GHz CPU, while a 450 MHz K6-2 is unlikely to draw more than say 20W.

As for the hard drive, it might, depends on the motherboard.
If you haven't done so somewhat recently(as recent as can be with such an old computer), you'll likely have to upgrade your BIOS.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: Some1ne

Running this comp 24x7 without a monitor is about the equivalent of having a 75-100 watt light bulb on 24x7. Unless you have ridiculously high energy costs this should only be about $.25 a day.

Exactly. PC's really do not use that much energy (or I guess another way to look at it is incandescent lighting uses an excessive amount of energy for what it does), and a system that old really isn't going to use much power, especially since it has onboard graphics and not a dedicated solution, and also because the CPU will essentially be idle the entire time. With no monitor, it will use *maybe* 100W at the very most (and probably actually closer to the 50W to 75W range in practice).

not that it uses a lot or will add up, but the older ones were not as effiecient, look at the new amd venice cpus vs just the barton cores, or even the mt turion series... quite a bit more effiencient with V in the 1.2 and lower ranges...

Well, those are still the same basic core.
A64 CPU's have a max TDP of 89W, more likely around 55-65 for a 2 GHz CPU, while a 450 MHz K6-2 is unlikely to draw more than say 20W.

As for the hard drive, it might, depends on the motherboard.
If you haven't done so somewhat recently(as recent as can be with such an old computer), you'll likely have to upgrade your BIOS.

yep, you are correct, i was totaly wrong :shocked:

 

[antsct]

Again thanks everyone.

I have been looking everywhere for specs and information for my old PC. If anyone can help me that would be really good.

It is a Compaq Presario 7400 Desktop

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: antsct
Again thanks everyone.

I have been looking everywhere for specs and information for my old PC. If anyone can help me that would be really good.

It is a Compaq Presario 7400 Desktop

no trying to be a d!ck, but you gave us the specs:

AMD K62 533MHz
320mb ram (will probably upgrade to 512 later on)
Onboard 8mb Graphics
8Gb harddrive (will proabaly upgrade later on but is still plenty of space)
Windows XP Pro SP2 (will run Apache Web Server)

what else do you need?

you can run cpu-z to find out chipset and ram