Freak Nation Site Tech Notes

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Freak Nation is a site run by, for, and about the freak community. Of course the technical aspects of the site in particular (as opposed ot the artistic or literary sides) are naturally run by geeks. We have a firm commitment to open-source software, for a wide variety of reasons. In addition, we find that it’s easiest to run the site on standard commodity hardware. Here’s a listing of all the details on just what goes into the site.

The site runs on cheap x86-compatible hardware, specifically an AMD EPYC 7402P 24-Core Processor 2800 MHz, with 7616 MB of RAM. Naturally, we use an open-source operating system — currently Linux (a somewhat modified ). This machine’s been up for 163 days, 2 hours and 48 minutes, and the last time it was restarted was
You shouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that we use Apache as our Web server software. We’re also using mod_perl. Most of the actual pages here are implemented using PHP 7.4.3-4ubuntu2.19 (as you probably noted from the URLs).
Valid HTML 4.01 This entire site has been checked by the W3C’s HTML validation service and found to be valid HTML 4.01 Transitional. If your browser refuses to render something here, it’s either ancient or broken. It’s not even XHTML yet (though it will be by the end of 2006, at the very latest someday, when we get around to it).
Valid CSS The site has also been checked by the W3C’s CSS validator, and found to use valid CSS. So if something here looks like ass... well, your browser may actually be fine. The webmaster isn’t a professional designer. (He just tries real hard to fake it, and not mess things up too badly.)
Valid CSS Our mailing lists are currently run on Majordomo 1.94, using Qmail as our MTA. This may well change some time in the near future. We also do spam filtration using SpamAssassin.

The site runs off a single DSL connection, with a 384Kbps upload rate. No, we haven’t got any mirror servers; we can’t afford ’em. Yes, we could probably be Slashdotted fairly easily. If you’re thinking of submitting something on this site to Slashdot, please warn us first! At least that way, we’ll have an idea of why we’re being hammered into the ground.

We also have a firm committment to encouraging freak community, and so we link to lots of other freak sites. There’s enough stuff involved there that we’ve put it all on a separate page — go take a look!