Current Server

From late January 2015
this server is a HP Gen8 Microserver


Previous Servers

Sometime June 2012 to 17 January 2015
this server was beside one on an Asus E45M1-I mainboard in a CFI-A7879 4-Bay NAS Chassis

13 February 2010 to 17 January 2015
this server was an Intel D510MO in a mini ITX M350 enclosure

It survived a cup of tea being poured on it, but died when it was pushed off a ledge and fell 2 feet whilst powered on. So much for all solid state!

June 2004 to February 2010
this server was a VIA ME6000 - 600MHz Fanless mini-itx board in a beautiful Hoojum Cubit case. Towards the end of it's life it was repeatedly crashing and eventually the harddisk was wrecked by this. In the end it turned out the wretched power brick was faulty and not providing clean power; if I'd known that earlier the server would have kept going longer.


Software used on this Server

It serves off the following free software:
FreeBSD (operating system)
apache web server with PHP
Piwigo Gallery album software
Meanalto gallery version 2 (I never liked 3) photo album software used for years before it was no longer supported.
mysql databases



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The Server Headache List

 New Server waiting for new headaches!

Joy of double encoding of German characters in MySQL UTF8. Fixed with a trick using conversion to hex as follows convert(unhex(replace(hex(g_title),"C383C2BC","C3BC")) using utf8)

Old Headaches

Internet Explorer does not properly support PNG files (the transparancy is wrongly handled). Though I've seen various “solutions” for this, I've converted all png files to gifs on white backgrounds, which is fine for the moment, but a pain nonetheless!

The Listen statement in the apache log file has changed between freebsd 4.x and 5.x (old listen 80, now listen 0.0.0.0:80)

To get the sound to work on freebsd 5.x you need to add the lines snd_pcm_load="yes" and snd_via8233_load="yes" to the file /boot/loader.conf you don't need to do anything else no matter what the people say!