This machine, web standards

Standards

This web site conforms to the current best practice standards for web page construction: HTML5 & CSS3. We would be interested to hear from you if you have problems viewing these web pages with any reasonably up to date operating system or web browser, in which case contact us.

You will get an error reported if you validate the CSS using the link above. This is because the W3C validator does not understand calc(100% + 1px) (yet), but is supported by most browsers.

Best viewed with the FireFox web Browser

What does this web site run on ?

The machine that runs the web site:

Is a Big V virtual host provided by Bytemark.
Runs Rocky Linux which is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The web server is Apache 2.4.
The web pages are generated using the PHP scripting language.
The Smarty Template Engine is used to separate display from appliation logic (MVC) and enable component reuse.
Some home grown wrapper programs invoked with Apache rewrite rules glue it all together. Where possible once pages are generated they are saved to a hiden .html file and subsequently served directly by Apache.

Other web subsystems

A specialised WikiPedia type knowledge base is managed with MediaWiki.
Advanced Web Statistics gathering on the web sites awstats.

What else does the machine do ?

In addition to serving web pages, the machine:

Is a mail server, using the Exim MTA, using clamav to scan email for malware, trojans & viruses; and spamassassin to filter unwanted email; sending some 30,000,000 emails a year.
Hosts many email lists using the mailman Mailing List Manager.
Dovecot IMAP server for several domains. User information held by MySQL ...
with SquirrelMail web mail for some of the users.
Email to FTP gateway using MailDocumentation.
Hosts a software repository for the yum package manager, built using mrepo.
Runs a FTP server using vsftpd.
Is a Domain Name System server for several domains using bind 9.
Is synchronised to Atomic Clocks and is a time reference server using NTP.
Runs the Relational Database Engines MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Maintains a Virtual private network using OpenVPN.