openAdmin
08-31-2009, 04:37 AM
“Hello from Earth” (http://hellofromearth.net/)site was designed to celebrate National Science Week by sending goodwill messages for 13 days this month from the public to Gliese 581d, a planet outside Solar System which may potentially support life.
A small group of Sydney-based open source developers helped put together the site under 40 hours that took in 5.5 million hits in little over a week.
The site was used to register some 25,880 short messages - under 160 characters - that were transmitted by the joint NASA-CSIRO Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, Australia.
The site was created using LAMP, an open source stack with Linux at the operating system layer, Apache as the web server, MySQL as the database and PHP as the scripting language.
Dean Turnbull, head developer at Sydney-based IT services, eNerds said the LAMP stack was chosen because it is "a freely available, easily configurable and extremely robust set of technologies." The system was deployed on a dedicated server by Anchor Systems, hosted in the Global Switch data centre.
Warren said there was only one small plumbing issue upon the site going live.
"The press got hold of this story - we very quickly had pieces in the Daily Telegraph in the UK and Boston Globe in the U.S.
"The server got absolutely flogged."
The server went down for two minutes on the third night as it struggled to cope with the traffic. The team allocated more Random Access Memory (RAM) to the server and managed to keep it up for the remainder of the project.
The messages are expected to reach planet Gliese 581d by December 2029. Should there be a response, we should know about it at the earliest by 2051.:)
A small group of Sydney-based open source developers helped put together the site under 40 hours that took in 5.5 million hits in little over a week.
The site was used to register some 25,880 short messages - under 160 characters - that were transmitted by the joint NASA-CSIRO Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, Australia.
The site was created using LAMP, an open source stack with Linux at the operating system layer, Apache as the web server, MySQL as the database and PHP as the scripting language.
Dean Turnbull, head developer at Sydney-based IT services, eNerds said the LAMP stack was chosen because it is "a freely available, easily configurable and extremely robust set of technologies." The system was deployed on a dedicated server by Anchor Systems, hosted in the Global Switch data centre.
Warren said there was only one small plumbing issue upon the site going live.
"The press got hold of this story - we very quickly had pieces in the Daily Telegraph in the UK and Boston Globe in the U.S.
"The server got absolutely flogged."
The server went down for two minutes on the third night as it struggled to cope with the traffic. The team allocated more Random Access Memory (RAM) to the server and managed to keep it up for the remainder of the project.
The messages are expected to reach planet Gliese 581d by December 2029. Should there be a response, we should know about it at the earliest by 2051.:)