I'm imagining that the HN hug of death will literally set the floppy disks on fire.
I almost spit my coffee out this morning because of this :)
A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
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Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#42Pragmatic approach would be host it from floppy disk, but have some caching proxy before it. It could cache into RAM, most modern machines have enough memory to cache many many many floppies. Even Raspberry Pi.
The website says that he uses:
"Xitami web server, because it's the only one that does no caching at all, so the website is always served fresh from the floppy."
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220120092324/https://old.bigca...
Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#43Unsurprisingly I got a 503 error. I'll be more curious how many requests it can handle if it is really only on floppy (no caching etc..). 1.44 MB is plenty of space to host a nice website !
Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#44Quoted post unavailable.
One point could well be to see how your setup handles extreme overload?
I guess different OSes and server software would handle it very differently, so using HN to trigger a huge overload would be a smart way to get some science done along those lines.
Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#45Couldn't you cache the entire site? The speed of the floppy shouldn't matter that much.
I think that would defeat the point - one of the items on his site "feature" list says :
Xitami web server, because it's the only one that does no caching at all, so the website is always served fresh from the floppy.
So I think it's more about proving what you can do with old software/hardware when you put your mind to it...
Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it's as interesting as putting a lawnmower engine in a container ship. Not even worth firing up because you know the ship won't move anywhere. I'd rather read about the story and implementation.
Lead with the positive curiosity of wanting to know how the author did this rather than your negativity of “what’s the point?” The author could very well post a follow-up article detailing how
What is there to talk about really? Hook up a USB floppy drive to an IIS machine, select the floppy as the source for the site and voila. Takes 1 minute to set up if you have a USB floppy drive hanging around.
Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#47Pragmatic approach would be host it from floppy disk, but have some caching proxy before it. It could cache into RAM, most modern machines have enough memory to cache many many many floppies. Even Raspberry Pi.
It's hosted on a machine with 4M of ram on windows 3.11, and specifically uses a web server which doesn't use caching (And I don't think Dos 6 caches files at the OS level, at least by default)
Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lead with the positive curiosity of wanting to know how the author did this rather than your negativity of “what’s the point?” The author could very well post a follow-up article detailing how
What is there to talk about really? Hook up a USB floppy drive to an IIS machine, select the floppy as the source for the site and voila. Takes 1 minute to set up if you have a USB floppy drive hanging around.
It’s great that you already have an idea of how this was done; others may not. There’s a lot to talk about there for people unfamiliar, don’t you think? Saying otherwise would be very close-minded.
It seems to me from your other comments in this thread that you’re intent on being negative / reductionist to others work without offering much to the conversation, so I will happily disengage with you now.
Re: A website hosted on a floppy disk (Be patient while it's loading)
#49Reminds me of that blog/magazine who went fully solar and stopped thinking about uptime. What a time to be alive. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
Unfortunately it is not fully solar - it is as far as it can go, but then it is connected to a home router connected to mains etc.
I do have a fully solar powered VPN gateway/LTE router/web server/Wi-Fi relay - in my case, it’s out of necessity, as I live in a deep valley, and the only way I could get internet access here was to stick a mast on top of a hill with an IP67 box of goodies and a solar panel and battery, and an LPDA and yagi antenna for LTE and 802.11n respectively. The web server isn’t public, but fulfils a few important functions for me.