Main Page

Welcome to Interpause.com

Interpause is a web and file server that I created for my family and friends to share information and files.

It appears this webpage is getting a surprising number of hits. What brought you to my site and what would you like to see? Feel free to send me suggestions via email. Thanks!

Andrew Phan (andrew.phan@interpause.com)

Sponsors

• Voyages Vietasie - Possibly the best travel agency in Montreal (Quebec), if not Canada.

Howtos

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/Howto/Setup Postfix, dovecot-sasl, imaps, maildir, mysql, postfixadmin, PositiveSSL certificate on Ubuntu 10.04
• Howto/Setup Bridged OpenVPN server on Ubuntu 10.04

Interpause.com History and Details

Interpause.com made its 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$ back in 2004, give or take a year (efforts to track down the exact date of purchase have been in vain as receipts are long gone).

Its first upgrades would occur in 2008, a big year, as it got not one but two significant upgrades. Earlier that year, the P3 was retired in favor of a Intel Pentium Dual E2160 @ 1.80Ghz processor. Then later that year, it received 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. First upgrade was thehardware with 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. Second upgrade was in terms of software as the server OS and services went through a paradigm shift, running for the first time off a Virtualbox virtual machine (referred to as a Guest OS), rather than directly on the real machine (referred to as the Host OS).

Today, Interpause.com operates over a residential (4 Megabit down/800 kilobit up) fastpath DSL connection. Using the Virtualbox virtualization platform, Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit is used for both the host OS as well as the guest OS. All services run off the guest OS and all files are protected from hard drive failure thanks to the raid controller (RAID 1 for the OS and for certain files synced every hour to an undisclosed offsite location; RAID 6 for all other files).

Interpause Services

• Web site hosting and file managing
  • Apache with SSL encryption
  • File Managers - https://www.interpause.com/~filemanagers/
  • Azureus HTML WebUI - https://www.interpause.com:6886/
  • Mediawiki (and soon Joomla, hopefully by the end of summer 2012)
• E-Mail
  • Webmail - https://www.interpause.com/~webmail/ (Roundcube) (currently broken: will be ported to new server shortly)
  • Imap server (Courier-imap and Courier-imap-ssl)
  • postfixadmin - https://www.interpause.com/~postfixadmin/users/ (currently broken: will be ported to new server shortly)
  • Mail Transfer Agent (postfix sasl)
• Database
  • MySQL and phpMyAdmin - https://www.interpause.com/phpmyadmin/
• Misc
  • OpenSSH
  • Samba
  • PXE and TFTP
  • VNC
  • OpenVPN
  • rsync
  • Hylafax (soon, hopefully by the end of summer 2012)

Free Amazing Software

There's a lot more, and I'll try to update this list shortly. Nothing beats free software that works, thank you to all you open source developers out there!

• 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

Private Pages

• Adult Guest - https://www.interpause.com/~adultguest/
• Andrew Phan - https://www.interpause.com/~andrew/private
• Espace - https://www.interpause.com/~espace/
• MDJ AMABAIE CA - https://www.interpause.com/~mdjamabaie/