The little server that could

This blog is hosted on a dedicated server in my closet at home. I switched from Github Pages to a self-hosted server because of finer control over the server, dynamic content and full HTTPS encryption. Let me introduce you to Yggdrasil:

logo

Yup, that’s a HP Pavilion DV6000 turned onto its back. The GPU is dead, half of the keys on the keyboard don’t work, the sound card is shot and the PCMCIA slot is missing, and yet it has been dead-reliable in hosting this site for 7 days straight, with the only interuptions being the Dynamic DNS updates between power outages. And that’s it.

It’s rocking a Intel Core2 T5500 ticking at 1.66GHz and is packing a whole 3GB of RAM. And all that glory is running Debian Stable.

Here are some traffic statistics in the past 7 days:

Served 1604 unique IP addressses
Served people from 73 unique countries
Served 23770 HTTP requests without problems
Rejected 1015 invalid SSH connection attempts from 77 unique IP addresses
System uptime is 37 days (had a previous life)

And also the core die temperature sensor is shot too, it is showing 13C in a 25C room:

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:       +16.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:       +13.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

If you are thinking about using a laptop as a server, all I’m saying is go for it! :)