So last night, my girlfriend’s dad gave me an old XP machine they didn’t have a need for. Turns out it has fairly decent specs, so I got to work installing FreeBSD on it. In the next few days, i shall be turning it into my new web server, and possibly putting my blog back on it (although it’ll be slower to serve it there, i can at least install plugins, which I’m still pissed off about with this blog). In the mean time though, i have been installing pfSense on the machine that was my web server. the specs of the old one are as follows:
- 500MHz Pentium II
- 196MB RAM
- 8GB HDD
- 2x RealTek 100Mbit NICs
and the new one:
- 2.4GHz Pentium 4
- 512MB RAM
- 6GB HDD
- 1 sis0 onboard NIC
- 1RealTek NIC
so basically it’s a much faster machine (though now I come to think of it, maybe swapping the disks wouldn’t be a bad idea). So what you say? Well, what I wanted to tell you is that pfSense is awesomely easy to use, it’s wonderful. the webGUI is well laid out and works very well, installing new packages like nmap, spamd, bandwidthd, OpenBGPD etc. is as easy as visiting the web interface and clicking a button. You get some nice graphs about most aspects of system performance (though they haven’t been working for me, not sure why, getting no data).
The other thing I was going to mention is how nice Seagate’s warranty returns site is. Our 250GB drive died recently (not sure when, it was hooked up to the web server and i never used it), so I checked to see if it was still under warranty. Just sick in the model number and serial number, and they’ll tell you exactly when the warranty ends. If you need to return it, you can go through two or three pages, choose the nearest point of contact for their repairs, and then print out a label with the address and your return address to stick on your parcel. They even give you wrapping instructions which is nice (though they seem to insist that you use a “SeaShell” plastic case to put the drive in, which of course I don’t own).
So, in the next few days, hopefully I’ll have a nice new web server, running my blog and being awesome!
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