Robin
Whittle's Internet Outpost in Deutschland
There's no "www." version of the following sites:
My main website is:
This has only the "www." version, which was the norm when I started it in 1997.
My wife Tina D. Whittle's domain tdwhittle.com has no webserver at present,
but please see:
Last updated 2015-06-07.
Here begins a discourse on where this virtual server is located now and in the past, and on industrial enterprise in smaller
German towns.
This Debian 8.0 GNU/Linux virtual server is running happily at http://www.hetzner.de.
The LikeTellingTheTruth site runs on a separate hosting account also with Hetzner - Level 4, which is well-suited
to Wordpress, with PHP, MySQL all set up and ready to go, and with two weeks of free rolling daily backups of both
the files (10GB) and the databases.
This virtual server collects pictures as it gets around. Being
rather virtual, it is a little unsure as to which of Hetzner's
data centers it is located within, but its best guess is that it resides in the biggest data center, near Falkenstein, Saxony,
formerly part of East Germany:
Google Maps (in June 2015) showed the site before its development as a data center park: The Google Map reference is here.
The field in the middle is now the data center. Here is a photo from 2012 when construction was proceeding.
This is a view from the north, since the buildings face north-east. More pictures here.
It seems that this data center uses lots of desktop PCs, which is
unusual for the industry. There seems to be passive cooling -
I read somewhere this data center don't need much cooling, due to the relatively cool climate.
This page from June 2015 shows some of the Hetzner team with students and lots of desktop machines.
This page at Wikimedia Commons shows racks and racks of desktop machines at night, at a Hetzner data center in 2012.
There's a smaller Hetzner data center park in Nuremberg, and another in South Africa. Not all of Hetzner's servers are
based on desktop PCs. Some are specifically Dell rack mount servers, such as R720 and R730.
Since June 2015, this server has been a Hetzner VX18 virtual server, with 4GB of RAM, 100GB of storage, and two cores.
Its a great deal for Euro15.88 a month, with 100MBps connectivity to the Net. If traffic (I guess outgoing - maybe both
directions) exceeds 6TB in a month, then the speed drops to 10Mbps.
Someone ran a UnixBench benchmark on the VX18 and the results, as best I can tell, show significantly greater performance
than any comparably priced virtual server I could find at Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean etc. There's a vast table of
benchmarks at cloudharmony.com and I wrote to them suggesting they add the Hetzner VX6, VX11 and VX18.
There's no fancy API or way of saving the state of a virtual sever, like the cloud servers at Rackspace where this virtual
server previously resided. The electricity is from renewable sources - hydropower and solar, I guess.
I traveled briefly in Germany in 1992, including to the Hunsruck - specifically the town of Morbach, (Wikipedia page) home
town of Edgar Reitz , on which he based his first Heimat series, which made a big impression on me when I viewed it with
just a few other people in the Dendy cinema in Melbourne, over three
consecutive nights in the mid-1980s. I really enjoyed
my
few days traveling in Germany in 1992, and was impressed to see so many small towns with serious industry, as was
depicted in Heimat with the optics factory.
Likewise Aaronia, who make extraordinary compact microwave spectrum analyzers:
and who have their headquarters in the small town of Strickscheid (photo by aRGee from Google Maps / Panoramio)
Likewise Audio AG, who make the renowned RME digital audio interfaces, such at this one we have:
who are based in the small town of Haimhausen, north of Munich
In Australia, industry tends to be concentrated in the few large
cities, though in the past there were substantial industries in
smaller
towns. Castlemaine had Thompson's Foundry, which produced mining equipment, crushers, locomotives and as
recently as the 1980s (when they had an open-day one Sunday when an Australian Railway Historical Society steam train
was in town) room-sized cast-iron sewage pumps. Trentham had the Trewhella jack factory.
This virtual server is displacing some farmland, providing employment to
people who like to live outside larger cities (as Tina and I do
now), and is probably not adding much to CO2 emissions!
Here is a picture taken in Falkenstein, by André Karwath in 2009 (source):
For quite a few years, this virtual server lived in a big datacenter north of Dallas Fort Worth, with 512MB RAM.
Rackspace had excellent deals, and I found the service reliable and cost-effective. In late 2014, they decided to
focus on higher-value services, exiting the mass-market, low-price, server and virtual server industry they pioneered.
Here is a picture of downtown Dallas.
The geography of DFW and Houston is very flat.
Before moving to Texas, this server used to run on its own dedicated motherboard - not virtual at all - in San Francisco,
where the scenery is more curvaceous . . .
Thanks to Gary Ewer at http://www.prosoft.force9.co.uk/
for these images!
Earthquakes - in recent weeks, days and hours . . . .
http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/SF_Bay.html
