Update: kankra is retired
Because the power costs are so high and I needed more server power, kankra is retired. I host now everything on my own server in a professional data center.
About kankra
Kankra is a Compaq ML530 server which belongs to me and a friend of me, Dieter Ries. Kankra is running always (except blackouts because of the missing UPS) and it's main task is running my and some other homepages with apache and all the nice scipt languages and addons.
But kankra is also useful for fun, kankra is also a game server for the open-source-game Cube, named as 2nd Zero Server.
If there is some performance left, it will be used for grid computing with BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networking Computing) with the projects Einstein@home, LHC@home and SETI@home.
On the following picture kankra is the nice grey maschine under the switches, some other pictures are avaible here.
The name kankra
The name kankra come from the world-wide known village kemel, there is a lovely hall with some big computers, in which I somethings are working with friends. At the entrance to the basement of this hall there are many spiders which are always named kankra, which is the the german translation of the spider in the lord of the rings by tolkien, further information in German here. Because of the suprising size of kankra, Dieter and I named our server kankra.
Linux on kankra
Kankra is running all the time, so it needs a really good and very stabile operations system. It was clear that it must be a unix or a linux, we decided to install Gentoo Linux because of the amazing performance of this Linux flavor. This comes from the concept of compiling everything directly from source and of the very good Gentoo developer team. Thanks for that at this point!
Equipment
Kankra is runnig two Intel XEON processors with 800 MHz and 1192 MB of ram. A Compaq Smart Array 3200 with 6 SCSI in a RAID array and two additional SCSIs at the system bus make sure that there is always enough fast place to store the data. All HDDs have a capacity of about 100 GB which is enough at the moment. The network connection is 1000BASE-T Gigabit LAN Interface which is quite much fo my internet connection (only 6 MBit DSL here...) but XDMCP is the reason for the fast interface. Two really strong (and of course very loud, thank you RITTAL ;-)) cooler care for a nice temperature in (and outside, I don't need a heating in the basement anymore) the server.
