Pitus

Pitus is the server that Jose Fuentes and Niko Kern built to host Hampedia and other services. Pitus is located in the server room, in the Johnson Library next to ornia. After the secondary RAID died, and multiple fans stopped working, the Hampeida Project decided to move Hampedia to a more stable machine, pi.

Hardware

 * Mainboard: 1 x MSI K9SD Master-S2R (MS-9185) (coreboot ready)
 * CPU: 2 x AMD Opteron 2216HE Dual-Core, 2.4GHz per core, 2MB L2 cache, 1GHz FSB, energy efficient 68 Watt TDP
 * RAM: 8 x Corsair 2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 Registered ECC
 * RAID card: 1 x Adaptec 31205 PCI-Express 12-port SAS/SATA RAID Controller Card
 * SATA Hard Disk Drives: 8 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS SATA-II 32MB Disk buffer (RAID-6 array)
 * SAS Hard Disk Drives: 2 x 146GB Maxtor Atlas 8D147S0 10,000RPM SAS (RAID-1 array)
 * Power Supply Unit: 1 x Seasonic S12-650, 650 Watt ATX, Energy Efficient 80 PLUS Certification
 * Heatsink/Fan: 2 x Dynatron A86G CPU Coolers
 * Chassis: 1 x 4U EATX Rack Mount Chassis IPC-4037x / CG-4U600

Software
Pitus runs only freely licensed software and operating systems. When Pitus boots up the first installed piece of software which loads is the boot loader, GNU GRUB from the RAID-1 array's Mast Boot Record(s). The boot loader then loads the virtualisation software, called Xen. Xen is responsible for booting a hypervisor under which the primary host operating system can be run. This host operating system, or Xen domain 0, was chosen to be the Debian testing distribution of GNU+Linux. It is a very minimilistic installation of Debian whose job it is comes entirely down to being a frontend between the Xen hypervisor and the operating systems which actually matter: the guests, or Xen domain Us.

Pitus is but one guest OS installation, only one Xen domain U of potentially many. The machine therefore always runs at least two operating systems at once: the initial bootup of the host OS domain 0 which in turn automatically boots the specified guest OSes. Each operating system installation can be backed up individually, given as much storage space as necessary, and can be migrated from one physical machine to another without being rebooted. Although the CPUs in Pitus allow for the hardware virtualisation of unmodified guest operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS X, there is no need to run any proprietary software on Pitus so it is being specifically avoided. Pitus will always run Freely licensed software now, and forever.

The core software powering Hampedia on Pitus is part of the famed LAMP stack, which includes Linux (the kernel), Apache (the web server), MySQL (the database), and finally PHP (the scripting language). All components on this LAMP stack are part of Debian, which is currently powering Pitus. The current versions of the critical software which powers Hampedia are:

Linux: 2.6.26

Apache: 2.2.9

MySQL: 5.1.63

PHP: 5.3.3

MediaWiki: 1.19.1

As new releases make it convenient, this software will continue to be updated. There are countless other helpful Free Software packages which are installed into Pitus, and this number is growing all the time, as is the functionality of Pitus. The features and services provided by this software will slowly reveal itself over time as separate from, but related to, the growing platform that is Hampedia.

Choice of Hardware
Pitus was created specifically to run no proprietary, non-free software from the ground up. The components were chosen specifically to financially support hardware manufacturers which have shown a notable movements to make their hardware work with Free/Open Source software and freely licensed drivers in the operating system GNU+Linux. For example, the motherboard was chosen because MSI paid an employee to add coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS) support to this motherboard so that people may choose to liberate the firmware on their motherboards by flashing the BIOS EEPROM chip and replacing it with an improved GPL-licensed alternative: coreboot. The manufacturer of the CPUs is AMD who was chosen instead of Intel Corporation because AMD released graphics processing unit documentation to the world so that Free Software drivers may be produced for all ATI-brand video cards with full 3-D acceleration. Intel however has been shown to be consistently stubborn in the process of making their wireless networking cards work with Freely licensed drivers and firmware. An Adaptec employee was contacted prior to the purchase of the RAID card in Pitus to confirm that Freely licensed drivers for their hardware accelerated RAID adapter cards were available in the Linux kernel.

An attempt was also made to purchase components which would draw as little power as possible. Pitus' power supply, the device which converts the wall's AC power to DC in order to provide the other components with electrical energy, has an 80 PLUS certification which guarantees that Pitus will never be less than 80% efficient in terms of the amount of energy it supplies, divided by how much energy is input. The company Seasonic was chosen because their products consistently achieve and surpass the 80 PLUS certification, being the first company to market with an 80 PLUS product back in 2005. The CPUs in Pitus are also much more energy efficient than most processors of this caliber. A normal Opteron 2216 consumes 95 Watts TDP, whereas the HE version of the same CPU (2 of which were chosen for Pitus) consumes only 68 Watts TDP at the same speeds.

Choice of Software
Pitus runs only 100% Free Software, which means software which has been released under a license approved by the Free Software Foundation. It is true and always will be that Hampedia is constructed of only Free Software on a system with a Free Software operating system, to ensure the security and longevity of the project.

The Xen hypervisor was chosen because it is an enterprise-level virtualisation solution which allows Pitus to have a GPL-licensed hypervisor under which multiple operating systems can run concurrently.

GNU+Linux was chosen for Pitus' operating systems because it offers the most powerful, flexible, modern server operating system with the additional benefit of being comprised of mostly GPL-licensed software.