You know how easy it is to lose touch with friends, family, and all the important people who make up your life? Well, it's a connected world now and we no longer have an excuse to let good friendships drift away. The White Spot (North) is my attempt to keep all the people in my life up-to-date on what's going on with me and all of us, any time, even if we can't get together as often as we'd like for reasons of time or distance.

The White Spot diner in Charlottesville, VA was a gathering place for my college buddies and me during some of the best times of my life. I now live north of it, but the name captures the essence of these pages: a place where old and new friends can gather, have a couple of laughs, and keep in touch with each other.

I frequently get asked about my web pages, the WS(N) server, and what I need to get all this up and running.  Here's a start.
 
 

Hardware

As of January 2000, the WS(N) server, nat, has been a Sun Microsystems (NASD:SUNW) Ultra^TM 10 workstation, which I purchased at a great employee discount from Sun.  I'm not a Microsoft fan and have been running some form of UNIX® on almost every personal computer I've ever owned, but needed a PC to run those pesky applications that just required a Microsoft operating system.  Trying to get a PC UNIX running can be a real chore when it comes to graphics and sound cards, tape drives, and other peripherals, so in 1999, when my old PC was getting long in the tooth, I decided to bite the bullet and get an Ultra 10 so that I wouldn't have to worry about compatibility.  The great thing is that Sun sells a SunPCi card, a plug-in board that runs all major Microsoft operating systems and their applications, so I got one.  Now I have the best of both worlds.

Here are some of nat's specifics:

• 440MHz UltraSPARC^TM IIi processor with 2MB of external cache
• 128MB of memory
• 32X CD-ROM
• 24GB of hard disk space
• 8GB SLR5 quarter-inch tape drive
• Creator3D^TM 24-bit double-buffered graphics
• Dual-channel fast/wide UltraSCSI adapter
• SunPCi^TM card with a 600MHz AMD K6-2 processor and 64MB of memory
• SunVideo Plus^TM video capture board with camera

 

nat runs the Solaris^TM 8 operating environment, the world's most popular UNIX variant designed specifically for Internet- and web-based applications.  Solaris now features the Apache web server, which is the one I use to serve up the pages for wspot.com.  For web browsing, Solaris includes Netscape's Navigator.  The one thing Solaris does not yet include is the Washington University FTP daemon, which is powering my anonymous FTP area.  Mail through the WS(N) is handled by good old sendmail and my mailing lists are maintained by the Majordomo mailing list system.

To create the web pages, I typically use Netscape's Composer, but a lot of times I just edit the HTML directly (hey, it's what I learned first!).  One of the tools I use is called sunpublish, a Java^TM-based package that we use internally at Sun to get a standard look-and-feel and I just run the output from that through a couple of custom scripts that I wrote.  This results in the look you're used to seeing at the WS(N):  the navigation bar at the left along with the headers and footers on the top and bottom.

I use three freely available programs to create graphics images and manipulate the photographs on the WS(N):  the wonderful GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP);  the amazing ImageMagick suite; and the ubiquitous xv.
 

Internet Infrastructure

I'm connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through my DSL connection provided by Covad.  Covad resells its services through regional and nationwide ISPs and in my case, that's Speakeasy.  Speakeasy provides all the services I need:  24×7 connectivity, four static IP addresses, 384K/128K bandwidth with an 80% guarantee, and a very enlightened attitude toward services provided by my server (i.e., do what you want at no extra charge as long as you're not spamming or serving up unsavory content).

I've owned the domain name wspot.com since 1994, thinking I might want to open up a business one day (see, I was Internet when Internet wasn't cool!).  wspot.com is registered through Network Solutions.  nat provides primary name service for the domain and Speakeasy provides secondary and tertiary name services.