Help needed testing my improved www server setup with 200LX

Hi all,

As some of you have noticed I've been researching and setting up a fully HP200LX hosted website for my youtube channel,
which will also become the subject of my next big technical/educational video.

I've ironed out all the issues and the 200LX is running the website in a stable way now
It should be available from now on 24/7.
The actual website is'nt %100 finished yet, but there's plenty of content (pages and images) to browse.

The main problem is that nowadays you NEED https (secure/ssl) access to your website otherwise people will get
a nasty warning page saying that your website is'nt secure, which could scare off some visitors,
and also google tends to prioritize HTTPS sites over HTTP sites when indexing.

Thus, I added a raspberry PI and installed apache2 on it with, bought an SSL certificate for my domain name,
installed it with apache2, and configured it as a reverse SSL proxy server.
This machine does'nt serve any website files, it simply receives incoming HTTPS requests on port 443,
decrypts them, then loads the page/images/etc... from the 200LX via HTTP,
and encrypts and sends everything back.
It's an easy way to add HTTPS support to a webserver that is simply too slow to do SSL encryption,
and, the webserver software I'm using on the 200LX does'nt support ssl anyway.

What I need now, before I release my video, is some help testing it.

Could I ask that everyone that reads this message and has 5 minutes to spare run some tests from your location
and see if everything works fine ?

The site is physically served from my home in New Zealand, with a static IP and gigabit fiber,
so it could be slow in some areas of the world as New Zealand is'nt that well connected to the world from a server point of view...

You should be able to access the site with HTTP and HTTPS in an identical fashion.
Remember that in both cases you are using the 200LX's http server which is actually serving the website files,
so i'm not cheating in any way with the raspberry PI.

Here are the urls:

HTTP (connect directly to the 200LX webserver):
http://www.palmtoptube.com

HTTPS (connect with https to 200LX webserver thru the SSL reverse proxy on the raspberry PI):
https://www.palmtoptube.com

I'd be interested in hearing from you the following feedback:

1. Do both HTTP and HTTPS URLs work fully (eg, can you access not just the frontpage but all pages with the menu on the left, and do all images etc load?
2. What kind of speed are you getting ? is it too slow for practical use, okay to use, or fast
3. Do you observe any differences in speed or response between HTTP and HTTPS access ?
4. Can you do some stress testing and rapidly reload a complex page with SHIFT+reload so it reloads all images etc... (like the shop page with all the serdaco product images) to really bombard the 200LX with requests ?

Please report your findings here, I'd really appreciate it
I'll be updating/completing the site during the next few days, and hope to finish my video about the process of setting everything up in a few days...

Cheers,
Terrence

Edited by radiance32 2022-02-15 12:43 AM

Nice.

Both sites working fine from my FTTH environment. The https site loads a bit slower, but that is expected as you say.

Both sites are loading fast from my laptop.

You could also use a free version of cloudflare when it gets very popular. They have things that do similar things as what you are doing, but as CDN.

Edited by stingraze 2022-02-15 1:47 AM

Working here, the rProxy connection is more sluggish, but passable.

Cloudflare is okay provided you're okay with them knowing and data mining all of your visitor data and demographics. They can protect you from attacks though if you ever have any issues.

Once your SSL expires, have a look at Let's Encrypt's Acme API - there are plenty of packages for Linux to support it. Zero cost public SSL. The more people who use it, the more pressure the monopolistic signing agencies will get the message and low their usually ridiculous prices!

Have you considered swapping the 10-Base-T NIC with a 100-Base-T one, something like the 3C589C? Given the average connection speed these days, 10Mbps is going to be a bottleneck for most inbound connections.

Regular site loads fairy quickly, reverse proxy takes maybe 4 seconds to load fully! Very impressive overall, really shows what these old devices are capable of

Hi Guys,

Thanks to all of you for helping me out with testing my setup.
It looks like it's good enough to run a proper site on, so that's what I'm going to do,
it might sound like a silly idea, but that's what my channel is all about,
trying to do extreme things with these palmtops

I've done some testing with a VPN from various countries and it does look very useable.

I wasn't aware about cloudflare (i've heard of it) and what it does,
and maybe some day I might use it if necessary,
but the current setup seems to be stable / reliable and fast enough for a simple site
with links, products and downloads for 200LX palmtops, to accompany
my youtube channel.

I hope it keeps running in a stable way and I don't have to reboot it every week or so LOL

Thanks for helping out,
Radiance

C:Amie, I thought the same, but, even with the 10MBps card, the 200LX can push at max about 300KB/sec out the door, about 1/3rd of the total NIC speed,
so replacing it with a 100MBps NIC would not have any real influence on the speed IMO...
I did a speed test downloading a large file over http and got around 300KB/sec continuously...

Remember it's an XT platform and 300KB/sec is a lot of information for such an old system, it's nearly a 5 1/4th diskette full of data (360KB), or nearly half the system RAM (640KB)
and if you calculate it, it can push 300 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 25.920.000KB = nearly 30GB per day out to internet clients, if running at %100 throughput, or sending a very large file...
That's a lot of information for an XT class palmtop LOL

In a 2nd video in a few weeks after the 1st one, I plan on adding a 2nd machine with an FTP server for my download area, and that one will have a different NIC (a netgear FA411 10/100Mbits) so it will be interesting to see if there is a difference, but I don't think so... The system and it's PCMCIA bus are limiting the throughput...

Cheers,
Terrence

Edited by radiance32 2022-02-15 11:20 PM

Well,

I received my Netgear FA411 10/100MBps card finally,
and it does'nt seem to want to connect to my switch at 100MBps, only 10MBps.
I'm using the same generic NE2000 compatible DOS packet driver...

Does anyone know anything about how to manually force these cards to use 100MBps full duplex from MS-DOS when using a DOS packet driver ?
My packet driver does'nt have any options for setting these...

Terrence