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« About the Site / Large File Area
The Krystal file area is just a directory on my downstairs machine that's accessible to the internet and used to serve to bigger files than can easily be hosted on xbomber.co.uk. The main payload is large videos such as the AI upscales of Star Fleet. People can just stream the mp4 files in the browser without needing to take up any space on their device, which is handy if it happens to be a mobile device. Access the file area SoftwareThe downstairs PC runs XAMPP, which provides an Apache server for serving files, PHP for server-side scripting and MySQL for databasing. It also gives you FTP and a few other helpful features. The house's main router is configured to route HTTP/HTTPS requests coming in from the internet to the IP that it always provides to the downstairs machine. To compensate intermittent changes to the external IP, the downstairs machine runs the Dynu client which periodically checks the external IP. If it sees that it changes, it updates Dynu's nameserver records for crash.ddnsfree.com to point to the new IP. Dynu also helps you to apply Certificate Authority-signed SSL certs to domains that it manages. That way, you won't see any privacy warnings in the browser. The below article made adding the CA-signed to XAMPP nice and straight-forward: XAMPP SSL Configuration and Installation Guide for Windows Hardware
It's a bit of a coincidence that my home server got called "Krystal" back in 2012, as that's also the company that hosts the main site. At that time, xbomber.co.uk was hosted on Peter Lewis' gibbering.net, which was an offshoot of the illicitdev project. It wasn't until 2014 that the site came to Krystal hosting. The box was named after Crystal Kane from Centurions. Krystal was a way of merging the first and last names. Anyway, that's what the box was called and it's not changing now. The public HTML directory sits on the machine's M.2 drive so it always responds nice and quick. The mechanical drives spin down after long stretches of inactivity and take a few seconds to spin back up. XAMPP is set to launch as a startup item and kick off the Apache service. So it should recover nicely after Windows decides to spring an update on us. 
I originally built the machine as a Phenom II X6 1045T (95W) on a ASUS Crosshair V Formula board. In about 2018, I rebuilt the machine as a Ryzen 1700 on an ASUS X370 when the crosshair started overheating badly. Shortly after that, I changed the chassis from a Sharkoon T9 to an Aerocool DS200. More recently, the XFX Radeon HD 7870 started to overheat so it was changed to a cute little Radeon RX 6500 XT, which seems remarkably efficient, which is just what you want for a machine that's running most of the time. Apart from the PSU, almost none of the machine is the same as when it was built. Milestones 2025.08.17 - XAMPP installed, firewall and auto-indexing configured 2026.01.04 - SSL CA-signed cert added to Apache, auto-indexing interface refreshed
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