Creating our School’s
Website (on Linux)
Bonjour le monde!
My name is Andrew Regan, and I am a senior at Central Cambria High School in Ebensburg,
Pennsylvania. I have been a fan and supporter of open source software for
quite some time now and I enjoy listening to internet webcasts like Jupiter
Broadcasting’s Tech Snap
series.
Last year, Nathan
Belsterling and I designed a website for our school’s chapter of the National Honor Society and
entered it into Pennsylvania Computer Fair
2015. Together we earned third place in Pennsylvania for the web-design
category. After coming home with a third place medal, we heard that our
school was looking to have their website redesigned. Then, an idea struck
us – we could design a new website for the school district and enter it
into Pennsylvania Computer Fair in 2016! That week, we wrote up a
proposal to redesign the school website and gave it to the high school
principal Mrs. McDermott. I didn’t think much of the proposal until after
a few weeks into summer when I got a call asking if we could come in for a
meeting with Mrs. McDermott and the superintendent, Dr. DiLeo.
Nathan was busy working at a summer camp, so I dressed up in business
attire and prepared to answer all of their questions. The meeting went
well and they loved the idea of creating a new student-designed website for the
school district. They gave us approval to present our plan to the school
board during the August meeting.
As we prepared for the
August school board meeting, I started looking for a quote for server hardware.
Being a fan of open source software, the first company I asked was
iXsystems. They come highly recommended from Jupiter Broadcasting as a
company that supports and contributes to open source projects – mainly FreeBSD.
In my original request, I only asked for the price of a rack mount
server, but they did much more than give me a price. I told them about
our project to redesign the school’s website and about our plan to enter the
new design into the Pennsylvania Computer Fair, and they offered to send us a free
1U rackmount server!
You can imagine our
excitement at getting to present the offer of a free new server to the school
board along with our proposal! It was both a frightening and exciting
experience to present our project to a room full of people, but it turned out
to be well worth it. The school board approved our plan and applauded us
for a great presentation. A few weeks later, iXsystems sent the new
server to the school where we got to take it home and unbox it! At the
time, we really didn’t know what we were getting, all we knew was that it was a
1U rackmount server. As it turns out, iXsystems gave us a really nice
machine! The server is a quad-core Intel Xeon processor with 32GB of ram
and two 1TB hard drives setup in RAID. After we opened it and hooked it
up, it only took us about 10 minutes to install an operating system on it.
After running it for two weeks, it seems to be working just fine!
When the site is ready for public testing, the server will be moved to
our school’s server room and it will be used to beta-test the new site.
Thanks iXsystems for the great new server!
