About Rufus.W3.Org

Location:

It is located in Boston, at MIT, on a machine owned by the World Wide Web Consortium.

European users can find a nearly complete mirror fr.rpmfind.net in France.

I have updated the photos with new ones (BIG) showing the big mess of getting 10 drives in a normal tower enclosure drives and fans and the big bad cables mess. And the way I solved the cable mess on the french mirror !

Hardware and Software:

It runs on an AMD K6, powered by Linux, a free UNIX. The floppy and CD-ROM were recycled from an old 486 going to the trash. This is a cheap machine, the total cost was around 2200$. I just wishes I had selected a better motherboard, the current one have IDE chipset which are really poorly supported under Linux.

It runs off exclusively from Maxtor IDE drives hoocked to the motherboard and a Promise IDE PCI card. As you can see the disk leds are always on ! There is now a 30 Gig internal drive for the system and logs, and 9 Maxtors drives ranging from 17Gigs, to 62 Gigs drives for the FTP areas. The nice thing is until now they are reliable (I keep my finger crossed !) and can be had for less than 300 dollars a piece :-) . They also run extremely cool, which allows me to stack them without problems. Anyway, to keep the box from overheating I have added 5 large fans inside the case to blow air on the disks and pull it out of the box fast. Even if the Maxtors don't tend to get hot, it's very important if you pack too much hardware in the box like I did.

The network card used to be an EEPro100 wich works well as long as there isn't too many broadcast packets on the network. The main card is now a Digital chip based one (tulip). Again, the network activity leds show a solid activity. The machine averages around 1000 packets per seconds, and I have seen pikes with more than 4500 packets/s.

It has been set up with the RedHat distribution. The Web server is of course Apache, the mailing-lists are majordomo based.

Here is a picture of the machine, notice the 5 drives packed at the bottom and the two on the top:

Back to the root...

Daniel Veillard <Daniel.Veillard@w3.org>