OCC 2025 (Day 4) A New "Server"
===============================

As part of the challenge, I quickly realized that my website and gopherhole are
currently extremely over-engineered in terms of architecture for deployment, and
as discussed in my post for day 1, this sometimes blocks me from posting more.
In order to change this behaviour, have more fun with my setup, and possibly
moving to a self sustainable (solar-powered) hosting setup, I decided to grab an
old HP t5740 thin client I had laying around and repurpose it as the web and
Gopher server for my site.

Since one of the goals of this setup is to have fun and enjoy my little garden
on the web, I decided to not go with the sane route of Linux or a BSD, but
instead to use Windows, but not any version of Windows...

Pictures of the highlights of the day can be found here:
   gopher://nathancampos.me/1/occ/2025/day4/


Windows POSReady 2009
---------------------

At first I wanted to use Windows POSReady 2009, a fitting and era appropriate
OS for this system, and since I never actually played around with it, this was
a great opportunity to do so.

After installing and ensuring it was up-to-date using Legacy Update [1], I went
to setup IIS and create a test website, only to realize that multiple sites in
IIS (equivalent to Apache's virtual hosts) is a feature that is only available
in Windows Server [2].

Sadly, not having multiple websites in IIS is a deal breaker for me. I want to
use this system for many other things, and I thus I require the ability to have
this isolation.

After thinking a lot about this, I decided once again to focus on having fun,
ignore the obviously sane choices and continue with Windows, only this time I
installed Windows Sever 2008 (not R2), the Windows Vista-equivalent version of
Microsoft's server offering.


Windows Server 2008
-------------------

I thought deeply about this, and really wanted to try out Windows Server 2003
R2, but it being end-of-life'd back in 2015, and having been extremely popular
in businesses back in the day, in my mind I think it's a big target for
malicious actors (as if Server 2008 isn't), and thus I decided to go with
something a bit more modern.

Server 2008 isn't a reference when it comes to security, and pairing it up with
IIS only makes things worse. I think the type of website that I run doesn't
attract that many bad actors for me to worry, but I will ensure to put
everything behind a proxy and isolate it so any damage can be controlled. I hope
people on the internet can be nice to each other for once.

The installation of the 32-bit version of Server 2008 went smoothly and I'm
currently installing all the required updates using Legacy Update [1]. I guess
it will make for quite an interesting web sever!


Next Project
------------

With the server more or less taken care of, I need another project to entertain
me during the week, so I'm thinking about writing a tiny portable Gopher server
that I can run on my PowerBook and on my thin client. May be a fun project!


[1]: http://legacyupdate.net/
[2]: https://serverfault.com/a/68371/12889