Unfortunately, the 50+ days of uninterrupted hosting came to an end recently. Whilst completing a new server hardware build, I plugged in the PSU to be greeted with a huge blue spark, accompanied by a loud bang. Although the power supply unit died, I was more worried about the fact that it took out the power to the whole house.

The server was to become a standalone backup server, but luckily I hadn’t slotted in the 4 x 250GB removable HDDs, otherwise I’d be looking at replacing them too.

Once I had isolated the burnt-out PSU, I flipped the relevant power switches back on and fired up the servers that slickhouse is hosted on. Within 5 minutes the whole setup was back up and running!

To those of you running Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005, ensure you have the following setup within the server configuration - When Virtual Server starts: Automatically turn on virtual machine if it was running when Virtual Server stopped. It saved me a headache and time!

This weekend I decided to put my mini-itx hardware to good use finally. It required an afternoon of setting up Server 2003 with a keyboard/mouse/monitor attached - but once it booted into 2003 I moved it to the loft, where it sits next to the 2TB fileserver:

The webserver is the small aluminium box in the top of the picture. Hardware wise, it’s a mini-itx EPIA 5000, which uses a 533MHz VIA C3 processor and 512MB PC133 SDRAM. Fairly useless in today’s standards, but I’m surprised how well it handles Server 2003 and indeed, serving webpages.

For anyone interested in trying this at home - it’s fairly straightforward. Simply forward http (and ftp if needed) to the webserver, using your router. Then register on DynDNS and pick a domain. I’m lucky as my Linksys router has an option to put in your DynDNS information and it will do the rest.I’ll keep you updated on any further developments, as I’m planning on hosting a few larger files on it (over 1TB of network storage) and using it for my ASP projects.