It’s been online with this domain name for several hours now, and things seem to be working good. I’m extremely happy with how things have gone and I’m looking forward to doing some really cool stuff with my new dedicated server.

So, how does it work?

The server is my spare PC. It’s an AMD Sempron 2600+ (clocked at 1.6 GHz) with 1.5 GB of RAM and it’s running CentOS 5 Linux. It has a 40 GB drive which has the OS and the data on it, and also attached is a 160 GB drive for backups and any other data I need to store.

The relevant ports are forwarded on the router to the server’s internal IP address (which is static).

The clever bit is the bridge between the router and the internet. Our ISP gives us a dynamic IP address, which makes running a server a little tricky.

I bought the domain name upfold.org.uk yesterday (damn those squatters who already got the .co.uk).

I also bought the Custom DNS service from DynDNS. I let DynDNS manage my DNS. The router updates DynDNS with our IP every time it changes, and DynDNS then updates the relevant DNS records so people can still get to the site. Also, DynDNS sets the DNS records to a very short time to live (TTL), to prevent caching which might mean the IP would be out of date for some users.

It’s a pretty nice system and it seems to be working thus far. Hoping it holds out!

Despite a downgrade in connection speed, you should get the pages a little faster, as you’re getting the full 1.6 GHz grunt of the Sempron, not CPU time shared with many other people.

And I get complete freedom. Now I need to get one of those “I am root” t-shirts. 😛

I’m working on putting together a ‘Server Status’ page, which will hold possible downtime alerts (not that anyone cares particularly about my site, but I want to document the evolution of this setup) and some statistics too. Will blog here when it’s up!