[COMP] State of the box address

I just wanted to spread some news on the status of Avenir web- nothing
bad this time, I promise. :)  "State of the box address" is something of
a joke (so laugh, ok? :) ), but I'd like to give a status update, and a
quick review of the past year.

I recently installed a caching DNS server on my workstation, which
appears to be helping a lot with the time it takes to queue up all of
the messages.  I only have to perform many [most] of the hostname
lookups across my hub, rather than to my ISP's dns servers, which are
across my relatively slow DSL link.  Since the cache only lasts for 24
hours, the performance increase is most noticeable when there are more
than one posts in a given 24-hour period; otherwise, it all expires, and
all of the lookups have to be done again anyway.  Blah... :)  

Back when the server was a Win95 box (and my primary workstation), I
"partition-magic'd" the hard drive (a 1-gig) to allow a 600-meg
partition for a slackware 3.6 install.  Well, the Win95 partition that I
left behind was the other 300 megs, and that'd be nice to have for the
Linux partition.  So one of these days, I'm going to take the machine
down, format it, and give it a nice, clean slackware 7 install. 
However, I'm not quite sure when I'm going to have the time to do all
that, so it's on the backburner for now.

Btw, it's still a 486 with 20 megs of RAM. =)

Just over a year ago, on Feburary 18th, I cleared the web server's acess
log, and started over.  It had only been running for about 3 months
then, so I wasn't too concerned about the loss of logging.  In just over
a year, we've accumulated 228,775 total hits on the web server (but note
that that's the number of server processes, not just "webpage hits"). 
I'm gonna out on a limb and say that's somewhat impressive. :)  I have
no definitive log of every email sent through the machine, but I can
estimate it at around 250,000, counting the traffic from COMP, my
personal email (which was at times 1000 msgs per day :( ), and the email
of the few people with Av Web mail accounts (if anyone else wants one,
mail me off-list).  Whee! :)

Over the past six months, unfortunately, I've been spending a *lot* of
time (read: 6+ hours daily) on an open source project, LANdb.  It's been
a lot of fun, but it takes a lot of time away from Avenir Web, and there
are a lot of things I wanted to accomplish with it that just won't be
happening anytime soon.  The project has attracted attention from the
likes of IBM and Intel, and those are big shoes to fill- a lot is
expected from the finished product, which promises to be the most
comprehensive network management database application in existence. 
Fortunately, due to the power of open source development, the whole
thing has come farther in six months than I ever could've taken it. 
Anyway, I haven't forgotten about you guys, I've just become rather
sidetracked. 

Much of the content on the site has become quite outdated.  I just don't
have the time to keep it all up to date anymore.  In case anyone's
forgotten, the Public Contributions Project is still open, so if you've
got any articles, reviews, projects you need hosted, or anything else
you'd like to contribute, feel free to drop me an email, I'd love to
hear from you.

As far as this list goes, I couldn't have asked for more.  Subscription
reached another all-time high the other day!  To everyone who's been
here from the beginning, thanks for hanging in.  To the newcomers,
welcome, and start posting already! :)  

It's been a long trip.  Search for "avenir web" on google, and you get
back a page full of links that are all on the site.  I guess you could
call that successful, right? :)  Most of the credit goes to you guys
though, really.  How did you hear about this list?  Probably from a
friend, right?  Keep passing the word around, cuz I can't afford banner
ads. :)  

The future?  Jeez, who knows.  Broadband internet access is so cheap and
widespread that I can afford to house the server myself, which makes
things a lot easier.  In fact, if DSL wasn't costing just $35/month, the
server would've come down back in November.  I suppose the hardware will
eventually give out: everything in it is second-hand; an old 486 Gateway
desktop, some cheap ram, and a small hard drive.  When that happens,
well, I'll have to replace it all (duh, right?), but there hopefully
won't be too much downtime.  All I can say is that one way or another,
Avenir web will be around for a long time, happily crunching out emails
and serving webpages.  

I hope I covered everything there- feel free to let me know if I missed
something.  Comments, questions, and suggestions, as always, are
welcome.

John


-- 
# John Madden  weez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ICQ: 2EB9EA
# Sys-Admin / Webmaster, Avenir Web: http://avenir.dhs.org
# LANdb: Network Admin Database - http://avenir.dhs.org/landb/ 
# "A kernel compile a day keeps the blue screens away."
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