The KARC has a new server!

 

 

The Kamloops Amateur Radio Club has been very fortunate to receive the donation of a Dell PowerEdge T610 server from SilverServers, a local website development, SEO, and web hosting company that offers web solutions for small to medium businesses all over the world.  Founder and President Mickael Maddison very generously agreed to donate the PowerEdge T610 when he learned that the KARC was in need of a server to help us manage our increasingly complex repeater network, data storage, and IP network services. 

For over 20 years, SilverServers has been providing website solutions to small and medium businesses within Kamloops, British Columbia and around the world. Their office, machines and data reside in Canada and are built and maintained entirely by their innovative team. Their skilled developers and writers are happy to offer custom web development, search engine optimization, hosting, graphic design, content writing services, software development and more.

History
The company that became SilverServers has been around since 1997. It has been part of the Kamloops tech community on a small scale since then, experiencing little changes with the needs of the tech industry over the years. In 1997, MBM Webcraft was started as a local web design and computer repair company by founder Mickael Maddison. By 2003 it had become SilverServers. Along with web design they built their own hosting system and control panel software to host websites. At that time SilverServers was a small, local business with mostly international clients. At one point there were clients in 22 countries all over the world!  They worked for mostly international clients until around 2010, when they started building up more local business.

SilverServers Today
Now SilverServers works mostly with local BC companies. They continued with their custom-built hosting system and web design until a big change around 2014, when SEO became popular. Companies all over the world started advertising that they did SEO. Since the SilverServer website code had always been written in a way that followed the standards of lightweight and mobile website design, they realized that they could do SEO in a way that was unique to the rest of the competition – they would focus on technology and building our own custom code first. That is what makes them different from almost everyone else.

Their Services
SilverServers is known in Kamloops and across Canada for our skilled team of website development and hosting professionals.  President Mickael Maddison has been been providing his technical skills for over 18 years while training a talented team of website experts.  Together his team has produced websites and custom hosting solutions for clients of all shapes and sizes.

What is the KARC going to do with a server?
Lee, VE7FET and Myles, VE7FSR have been busy (the credit goes mostly to Lee!) configuring the Proxmox server, setting up virtual disk arrays, setting up virtual machines (VMs) and configuring and tweaking the server software and VMs themselves. To date Lee has configured four VMs, including a Windows 10-based DVR security system to record the mountain top webcams and alert us to intruders, a Linux-based KARC Wiki that contains detailed information about the KARC network and repeater system, and a Linux-based Nagios server that provides us with IT monitoring, network monitoring, server and applications monitoring.  While we work on setting things up and making sure they are working, the server is in Myles basement, but the plan is to deploy the server on the network at our Mt. Dufferin location soon.