dhiren.za.net

I doubt anybody actually reads this blog, so I'm sure nobody really noticed, but the site was offline for around two months from around April till June.

I host the site from home on my (previously sentech, now adsl) crappy home connection. Thats why its so slow, and generally sucky. I used to use an aopen minipc as my "server", hosting this pointless site, as well as my personal email, and a bit of other junk.

So, of course, I figured that since this little box was going to be running 24/7, I could use it to crunch numbers for Folding@home. This uses your idle cpu time to do processing that simulates proteins folding in different ways, to try and better understand diseases including cancer, cystic fibrosis, alzheimers, and other nasties. Lots of good research has come out of analysing the results of the processed numbers, so it's definitely worthwhile participating.

Except that it makes the cpu run at 100% utilization 24/7. This makes the cpu very hot, which makes the cpu fan run at full speed 24/7. And so my cpu fan burned out. And since this is a custom form factor computer using a notebook cpu with a special fan/heatsink that blows air across the heatsink rather than from the top down, it was difficult finding a replacement.

We had a lot of fun at work trying to build a new one out of a water bottle bottom and some other small fans that we found, but they never worked quite right. Eventually I tracked down a proper replacement, and the minipc was up and running again, altho I never got around to moving the website and other junk back onto it. Which is a good thing, because the minipc ended up being stolen a month later.

Even though I know nobody cares, I'll tell you about the current "server" anyways. It's a Pentium 3, 450mhz, with 256MB ram running Gentoo Linux. Compiling stuff does take quite a while, but it's been incredibly stable for a processor thats around 10 years old now.