Welcome to the PowerBook 190 Server

The PowerBook server is down and this site is now hosted elsewhere. The software running the network card couldn't handle modern encryption standards, and I don't want to leave my WLAN network unprotected. But I'll leave the site up in case anyone is interested.

Hardware

This site is was hosted on a Macintosh PowerBook 190 computer that I bought in 1995. Originally it had 8MB of memory, but when memory got cheap I upgraded it to its maximum of 40MB. It has a whopping great big 500MB hard disk and a Motorola 68040LC chip running at a blistering 33MHz.

The power adapter connector came loose (a common problem) so I took the machine apart and soldered it back onto the logic board again. (If I had taken the machine to an Apple shop a few years ago, they would have solved this problem for me by replacing the logic board for free under their repair extension program. But I didn’t know.) Then it turned out that parts of the connector itself were loose, so I took the machine apart again, took the connector off, fixed it, and put it on again. Then the plug on the mains cable came loose, so I replaced the mains cable. Then the power connector started playing up again so I took the machine apart again, took the connector off the logic board and soldered the power supply output directly onto it. That fettled it.

The hard disk is noisy and the server lives in my study, so I put the system software, server software and files on a 32MB Sony Memory Stick in a PCMCIA adaptor, and set the hard drive to sleep as soon as possible after startup.

Software

The server is running under MacOS 8.1, which is the latest version of MacOS to run on the machine and also seems to be the stablest. It is running the web server MacHTTP 2.6 and a script application that supplies customised error pages for the different domains hosted and directory listings when I want them.

To transfer files from my Windozer to the server it is running NetPresenz as an FTP server. This is also an HTTP and gopher server, but its HTTP functionality lacks some of the features of MacHTTP, and gopher has slid into undeserved obsolescence.

I ran Eudora Internet Mail Server 1.3.1 for a while, but it wasn’t such a good idea (see below). I also tried out the Stalker Internet Mail Server, which has the advantage of a web interface for remote control, and the disadvantage of being more complicated to set up. (You need the guide.)

Connection

The server is connected to the Internet via:

an Enterasys Roamabout PCMCIA WLAN card, running on driver version 4.02.
a Siemens Gigaset SE515 dsl router.
a Deutsche Telekom telephone/ADSL connection. Unfortunately, no-one else is available out here in X-Ray Valley.
an Internet access point provided by bycall.net. Despite their name, they give me a volume-based tarif, meaning I can leave the connection on all the time. (Until Telekom interrupts it, whereupon the router re-establishes it.)

The jcrompton.de domain name is managed for a small fee by United Domains. For the mac.jcrompton.de and www.jcrompton.de subdomains it is redirected to subdomains of xrayvalley.homeip.net. The xrayvalley.homeip.net domain is provided for free by dynDNS and dynamically linked to my variable IP address by ~~a dynDNS client built into the router~~ the 68k version of Macintosh DynDNS client 2.0. Messing around with a dynamic IP address was too much like hard work, so I got a fixed IP address from my ISP.

Lessons learned so far

Although the Enterasys Roamabout WLAN card is built with the common ‘Orinoco’ chipset, the more up-to-date version 6.04 WaveLAN driver for Orinoco cards doesn’t work with it. Presumably hacking the driver where it identifies the card would fix this, but my feeble attempts to find out where this is failed. Enterasys gets Brownie points for still making the driver available for download for this old product on old systems, but loses them for failing to update it. Lucent, the maker of the Orinoco chipset, gets thrown out of the Brownies for having a horribly orgainised web site where the driver is not available at all.
Increasing the disk cache size to preposterous levels did not improve performance or stop Eudora Internet Mail Server accessing the hard disk when my mail client logged on.
If you use the Eudora mail server, go to Server --> Relay restrictions and disable relaying by clicking on ‘Only relay for local domains or the following domains’ and not entering any domains. ‘Relaying’ in these decadent days is equivalent to ‘allowing some spammer to use your computer to send his/her/its shite.’ My server had been on line for all of four days before it was abused.
Running a mail server to receive mail on a dynamic DNS address is sub-optimal unless your dynamic DNS service is absolutely rock-solid. If you have another option, use it.
Some significant internet providers (AOL, for example) will not accept mail sent from a server without a fixed IP address and a reverse DNS lookup (I have one but not the other).
The DynDNS.org client in the Siemens router is ~~broken~~ to be handled with great care. When the router is rebooted, it contacts the server to update your IP address whether or not it has changed. If you have to reboot it several times in a row (because Siemens couldn’t be bothered to fix all the bugs yet, for example) and your provider gives you the same IP address each time then this leads to DynDNS getting upset about you generating unnecessary traffic and deactivating your address.
When first installed normally in the Extensions folder, Macintosh DynDNS client 2.0 made the Finder hang with an error number 10 or 7 (no doubt they mean something) when it was told to restart. Starting the client with AppleScript after the Finder had started up fixed the problem. Later I reinstalled the system and the problem went away.

More stuff …

On this site there are some pictures of the server and its working environment.

If you want some of the software mentioned above and can’t find it anywhere else, you can download it from my downloads page or my extensive (not) software archive.

Apart from this information about itself and the software, the server ~~also hosts~~ used to host my professional home page. I tried hosting my personal home page on it, but rather to my surprise, it got too much traffic. (The low traffic level for the professional site is no cause for concern: conference interpreting is a minority taste.)