People often have a very imaginative idea of what web servers actually look like. Many conjure up an image of a room full of enormous super computers with lots of flashing lights that would be on a par with NASA's command centres like Houston.
Well maybe that's true for some of the larger corporations like Yahoo, but what about Feesch? Well The hardware that Feesch uses is probably not far off what you are using at home to browse the Internet.
The software is very different though, I use Linux based operating systems. You can get Microsoft servers and even Mac servers, but Linux is free and it's reliable.
 Ok, it's shock time. This picture shows the plush web server room where it all happens. Yes, it may look like the rather unpopular end of a storage room where people throw old cardboard boxes, but that's mostly because it is. And you might be forgiven for thinking that the workbench looks similar to an old Sony monitor box, it is.
 Feesch 1 is an AMD K62 450Mhz with 256Mb RAM. It doesn't actually do much these days, but at one point it did everything. Now it mostly serves up static content like images and HTML files like this. It is also responsible for redirecting requests to other servers, like getting Feesch 3 to run scripts.
 Feesch 2 is an Intel P2 350Mhz with 128Mb RAM. Until quite recently this was the Feesch Chat Server (IRC), and it was responsible for some of the most important scripts (welcome pages, searching, expanded pages). Now...it's just the Chat Server.
 Feesch 3 is an AMD K63 700Mhz with 128Mb RAM. Until quite recently this was the Feesch Database Server and it used to run all the other scripts that Feesch 2 didn't. Now it runs all the scripts, but the database has moved...
 Feesch 4 is an Intel P4 1.6Ghz with 768Mb RAM. It's the newest and beefiest box of them all, it's the new Feesch Database Server.
If you look carefully at the main picture, you can see the network hub on top of servers 3 and 4, this lets me connect up to 8 servers into one network port which then connects up to the Internet on a 2 meg line. Also, on top of Feesch 1, you'll see my dataswitch. This lets me use one keyboard and one monitor to control all four servers, though most of the time I control them remotely from work or from home.
Well that's it, I hope you enjoyed your little tour of the Feesch Empire and you now have a better understanding of the technology that makes it all possible.
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