Recently I decided to correct my oversight of not having obtained a Raspberry Pi, so I purchased the Model B version along with the nice clear case and named it “Colossus”.
Never having owned an Acorn Archimedes (I was an Amiga man) the first thing I did was play with RISC OS for a while. Having got that out of the way, I installed Raspbian Linux and decided to have some fun creating a demo web page showing continuously updating statistics from the Pi.
I ended up using a Bash script to generate a single page of HTML incorporating an embedded image. I then piped this script through Netcat to create a single-threaded web server. And I then ran all of that several times, each instance on a different port, to create a multithreaded web server which I named “Hydra”.
I needed something at the front end to distribute incoming HTTP request on port 80 to Hydra’s multiple ports, and a very simple command utilising the handy Pen load balancer did the trick for that.
The finished web site could once be seen in all its geeky glory, but sadly is no longer online.