The machine has been featured here before but it has achieved a fun milestone: more than 1,000 hours of continuous runtime without restarting the software, rebooting, etc. See the stats at http://brutmanlabs.org/status .
The machine is a 4.77Mhz IBM PCjr probably made in 1984 running IBM PC DOS 5.02. A Xircom PE3-10BT Ethernet adapter (originally designed for laptops) on the parallel port allows it to connect to network. It has a modern-ish IDE controller and an SSD but those are only needed because of the amount of content; the machine could happily serve pages from RAM indefinitely. (Serving from the floppy disk would be painful, and probably short lived for the floppy disk.) I am cheating slightly and sending large, multi-megabyte requests for PDFs to another machine because I don't want those to tie up the machine for so long.
The software is my the mTCP HTTPServ web server. It runs on everything from DOS 2.1 up, supports up to 8 concurrent users at a time, supports filename and path mapping so you don't have to look at horrible DOS 8.3 paths and files, supports BASIC auth, logging, and a few other fun features. I've been working on it for nine years now. (mTCP is even older at 14 or 15 year now.)
The tricks to keep it running this long are a small UPS system and an SNTP client so that it can keep the clock synced with the rest of the world. The UPS protects the machine, router, and fiber ONT for a total load of 45 watts. The machine loses a few seconds here and there due to lost interrupts for the SNTP client is a necessity for longer runs. The SNTP client also helped it transition through the daylight savings time change in March.
The limiting factor is going to be disk space for logging; it is generating logs and eventually that disk partition will fill up. (I need to add log rotating and compression.) This machine was running when the ChatGPT client for DOS was announced, and it was hosting the mTCP networking pages at the time, so it got quite a bit of traffic. I learned after that to leave a lot of space for logs.
The machine is a 4.77Mhz IBM PCjr probably made in 1984 running IBM PC DOS 5.02. A Xircom PE3-10BT Ethernet adapter (originally designed for laptops) on the parallel port allows it to connect to network. It has a modern-ish IDE controller and an SSD but those are only needed because of the amount of content; the machine could happily serve pages from RAM indefinitely. (Serving from the floppy disk would be painful, and probably short lived for the floppy disk.) I am cheating slightly and sending large, multi-megabyte requests for PDFs to another machine because I don't want those to tie up the machine for so long.
The software is my the mTCP HTTPServ web server. It runs on everything from DOS 2.1 up, supports up to 8 concurrent users at a time, supports filename and path mapping so you don't have to look at horrible DOS 8.3 paths and files, supports BASIC auth, logging, and a few other fun features. I've been working on it for nine years now. (mTCP is even older at 14 or 15 year now.)
The tricks to keep it running this long are a small UPS system and an SNTP client so that it can keep the clock synced with the rest of the world. The UPS protects the machine, router, and fiber ONT for a total load of 45 watts. The machine loses a few seconds here and there due to lost interrupts for the SNTP client is a necessity for longer runs. The SNTP client also helped it transition through the daylight savings time change in March.
The limiting factor is going to be disk space for logging; it is generating logs and eventually that disk partition will fill up. (I need to add log rotating and compression.) This machine was running when the ChatGPT client for DOS was announced, and it was hosting the mTCP networking pages at the time, so it got quite a bit of traffic. I learned after that to leave a lot of space for logs.
It beeps when somebody visits - enjoy!