And The Server It Runs On
We are slowly morphing this site, so don't be surprised to see new
content and upgraded features. We want to eventually improve the
disaster services areas as well. We offer free email accounts and
web space to amateur radio operators. We also have resources
that hams will find useful and interesting. The main reason we do
this is for fun, as long as the fun lasts, and people find this site useful,
we'll continue to maintain it.
Qso.com is a partnership between John Griffith, (N7OKN)
and Warren Andreasen (K7CWA). The server in years past
existed
in various hardware configurations at Warren's house, but
with a move and
cheaper Internet cost at John's place, we moved it there.
As technology has
improved in the area of micro-computers, we decided to
move the services
to a Raspberry Pi 4 which Warren has provided and John
hosts. Warren does
the updates and other maintenance remotely, and John
handles the backups and
any hardware issues.
The Raspberry Pi has come into its own as a
reliable
affordable computer. This model has 8 GB RAM and a 256GB M.2
SSD drive.
The drive is the long black thingy attached to the Pi. The
Pi natively uses a
micro SD card, but can be made to boot and run from its USB
3.1 ports making
it faster and more reliable.
Here is the server as it stands today:
This is what the M.2 drive looks like out of its shell:
Solid
State drives are in most laptops and many desktop computers
these days. It's preferred over
spinning platters for a number of reasons.
This
server
runs on a variant of Debian called Buster for Raspberry Pi.
We use Apache2 for the
web server. This server currently hosts four domains,
OpenFire XMPP server, a web based chat server, and a host of
daemons and utilities to aid in maintenance.