SGI Indido R3000 Elan

Upgrading an SGI Indigo R3000 - an 18 year old machine - is not without risks: the Magick Smoke already escaped once, forcing me to replace the z-buffer board. However, I have sourced an alternative, and coupled with an extra 3 GE's, should be able to take my XS24-Z up to an Elan. Well that's the plan.

Big thanks to Ian Mapleson, for his help sourcing the parts: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/

I also have plans on trying to get a newer version of PERL on IRIX 5.3, so I can possibly run Webmin. The guys at work think im crazy. You know, they could have a point. =)

Thank you, Jamie Cameron http://www.webmin.com

watch this space!!

update: 24/04/09 - the parts have been despatched via special delivery! should arrive soon. Who put the idea in my head of getting Mozilla FireFox to run on Irix 5.3, eh, Ian - Who indeed? Damn you, there goes my social life this year. Oh well, no great loss =)

update: 04/05/09 - Finally succeeded in booting the machine, but not able to restore the IRIX 5.3 OS yet, due to SCSI CDROM trouble (SCSI bus reset). I've swapped drives, and cables, to no avail. Was hoping to avoid this grief, but since my last update, I've lost 5 servers. (Its been a tough week). The 13 year old SGI O2 which I was hoping to become the network CD share / mount point decided to blow the PSU with a tremendous explosion, the resulting electrical power surge causing a fair amount of collateral on that circuit.

However, I'm back up and running now, limping along on a spare PC server, and an Octane with a dodgy graphics card - at least one of those should help me get the CDROMs online. I might even get around to installing the upgraded hardware, soon!!

Oh, well... looks like Im going to end up installing a BOOTP server again - so look out for the post on that!

Apache, MySQL and PHP (AMP Servers)

What is an AMP server? (also known as LAMP, WAMP, XAMPP...)
As the title suggests, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or sometimes PERL) running together make an AMP server. LAMP suggests that they are running on a Linux platform, WAMP denotes a Windows server and XAMPP is a package that can be used to setup an AMP server on Apple's OS X.

Apache is a web server
MySQL is a database engine
PHP & PERL are scripting languages typically used on web servers.

Whilst PERL (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language) is a very mature and powerful language, novice programmers may find it difficult to start with. PHP on the other hand, was intentionally written with the novice developer in mind, deliberately making it easy for novices to create web pages and applications. It has also matured, and supports Object Oriented Programming concepts, such as classes, Inheritance and so on, has a clean looking syntax resembling C/C++ (simmilar comments, and bracing styles).

It does upset some OO purists as in keeping with PHP's 'lets keep things simple for the webbie' approach meant it has done things in a way that might not be considered 'true'. For example, it is not a strongly typed language, and it recently changed its default behaviour for passing by value and passing by reference.

If none of that made any sense to you, don't worry!! You could start out with PHP writing things in a procedural style, and find that as your skills develop, you will discover that PHP can grow with you, and you can begin to adopt the OOP style.
(Object Oriented Programming, vs Procedural style.)

Now this post is deliberately short, and meant as an introduction to new users. There are other alternative databases, webservers, and scripting languages, and I am not suggesting they cannot be used instead. In fact, the concepts which apply to an AMP server could equally apply to IIS, PoorMan, Lighthttpd, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL server, and so on - feel free to experiment and find what works best for you! =)

The reason for covering AMP servers is that I use them myself, and they form the fundamental basis from which I create my sites and applications. When I cover the topics in more detail, I will most likely use AMP projects in the examples. By keeping to a common platform in this way, I only need to explain the basics once - and can focus on writing about the concepts, instead of the differences between all the competing technologies.