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Welcome to Interpause.com

Interpause is a web and file server that I created for my family and friends to share information and files. - lucky13bbq@interpause.com

Sponsors

• Voyages Vietasie - Our recommended travel agency in Montreal (Quebec), Canada.

Howtos

Disclaimer: My Howtos are mainly for me to document the steps required in case I ever have to re-do them again. Hopefully they will help other system admins out there, but I regret that this is not my primary objective.

• Howto/20230921 Use a cheap VPS to bypass ISP blocking of port 25 to postfix mail server
• Howto/20161028 Enable LTE for Nexus 4 running 5.1.1
• Howto/20130118 Setup Routed Tun OpenVPN server on Ubuntu 12.04
• Howto/20120923 Repair corrupt MySQL database that won't start
• Howto/Setup Postfix + dovecot sasl + dovecot imaps + maildir + virtual accounts + mysql + postfixadmin + PositiveSSL certificate + Roundcube on Ubuntu 10.04
• Howto/Setup Bridged OpenVPN server on Ubuntu 10.04

Interpause.com History and Details

Interpause.com made its humble beginnings on low-end (i.e. cheap) hardware. It was first brought into this world on a second-hand Dell Optiplex Pentium 3 450 Mhz desktop that cost under 200$ circa 2004.

Its first upgrades would occur in 2008, a big year, as it got not one but two significant upgrades: the P3 was retired in favor of a Intel Pentium Dual E2160 @ 1.80Ghz processor, a new 20-bay 4U rackmount case as well as an Adaptec 31605 16-port raid controller.

The next upgrades would be at the end of 2011/start of 2012 with another two significant upgrades: 1) the retirement of the E2160 in favor of a Intel i5-2400S Processor @ 2.5 Ghz and RAM totaling 8 GB of Dual Channel DDR3 RAM, 2) a software paradigm shift to Proxmox virtualization.

Today, Interpause.com operates over a residential (40Mbps down/60Mbps up) FTTH connection. Using the Proxmox virtualization platform, the latest flavors of Ubuntu LTS are used for the various guest OSes. All services run off the guest OSes and all critical files are protected from hard drive failure thanks to the hardware raid controller and are automatically backed up offsite using rsync for mirroring and duply/duplicity for historical file versioning.

Amazing Software

Nothing beats free software that works, thank you to all the developers that make such software possible.

• Parted Magic for its numerous utilities including Gparted for resizing partitions and Clonezilla for cloning hard drives
• UNetbootin for booting off USB keys instead of CDs
• Azureus/Vuze for making such an amazing bittorrent client
• Memtest86+ and Prime95 for helping me isolate hardware failures
• Proxmox VE for the incredible bare metal hypervisor virtualization environment.
• Virtualbox for an impressive virtualization software package.
• ISPConfig for the central dashboard that configures dedicated web, mail and db servers
• Ubuntu for the OS that drives this server.
• Roundcubemail webmail
• Many Others: Apache http/https server, Postfix server with Dovecot imaps, OpenSSH, Samba, PXE and TFTP, VNC, OpenVPN, rsync, NFS, MySQL server with phpMyAdmin access, Pydio php filemanager, etc.