Bongo.net Site Description

Mark Bondurant
September 14th, 2001

The Problem

As a software engineer, from my perspective, static web pages are not particularly useful nor are they really very interesting. Computers really show their power in the acquisition and persistence of information. With the ability to accumulate information, software gains the ability to grow beyond its original boundaries. Static web pages cannot do this. Without databases they become somewhat less interesting than comic books. This is not to say that comic books are bad, I like to read them myself. It’s just that I rarely read them more than once.

There’s really very little that can be done with the usual five megabyte website that can be rented from your local ISP. Dynamic content is mostly limited to making widgets spin on the screen and data that can be stored in small flat files. A case in point is Pancet, a game located on this web site. In a way it has a database, but it persists only for the length of the player’s session. Then all that it has learned is lost when the player leaves. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if it remembered who you are, learned and grew with you each time you came back and played the game? It could grow more complex as your ability to play improved. Perhaps it could add different shapes instead of just balls or bowls with different attributes as the move tree grew beyond certain threshholds. At that point you move beyond the realm of simple situational decision-making and move into the land of training and learning.

Plainly, I want a web site with a database. Unfortunately there are a number of obstacles that have been placed in my way. When my family moved into our current neighborhood, our phone lines would not support DSL. That left cable modem services. We had two to choose from, both essentially identical.  Both do not offer fixed IP addresses and both block port 80 to discourage web servers at home. A very frustrating situation that may have turned out be an advantage.

The Solution

Verizon was blocking web, ftp, and email services, but all other ports were wide open. We could run our web site from another port, but I needed a way to direct traffic there. Enter Earthlink.

In doing the research on Earthlink though, I discovered that they offered a fairly reasonable web site rate. For $15 per month, they would give me a 5 megabyte site, with ftp access (yuck) and host my domain name at no extra fee. They would even deal with the Internic for me! I also was allowed full access to Perl. This was perfect.

The next problem to surmount was the process of redirection. This would have been simple if we wanted to leave our servers on all the time, but we weren’t ready for this yet. The solution was to create a Perl script that checked to see if our web server was available. If it was it would redirect users there, otherwise users would see a reduced static version of the site that would be hosted by Earthlink in the five megabyte space that came with the account.

The next problem to surmount was the lack of fixed IP addresses from Verizon. We first considered scraping the web interface provided by our firewall to get the current IP address and then ftp’ing it over to the root site at Earthlink. But it turns out that the latency on IP address leases from Earthlink is 24 hours. Our firewall apparently answers whatever pinging their DHCP server does, so unless the power goes out for more than 24 hours, our IP address is ours. If we lose it for some reason, then our users will failover to the static site until we can reset the address.

So now we have a site were we can bring up any server we want to up, with whatever content we want to provide. We have complete control. Currently we have two, an NT box and a Linux box, which is plunty!