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.

-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/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$ 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 the hardware 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 (3 Megabit down/800 kilobit up) cable 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 off-site location; RAID 6 for all other files).

Interpause Services

• Ajaxplorer php file manager - https://www.interpause.com/filemanagers/
• Azureus HTML WebUI - https://www.interpause.com:6886/
• Roundcubemail webmail - https://www.interpause.com/webmail/
• postfixadmin - https://www.interpause.com/postfixadmin/users/
• MySQL server with phpMyAdmin access - https://www.interpause.com/phpmyadmin/
• Apache http/https server, Postfix server with Dovecot SASL, Dovecot imaps server, OpenSSH, Samba, PXE and TFTP, VNC, OpenVPN, rsync, NFS, Hylafax (soon, hopefully by the end of summer 2012)

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
• Virtualbox for an impressive virtualization software package.
• Ubuntu for the OS that drives this server.

Private Pages

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