X-Bomber | Krystal File Area

The Krystal file area is just a directory on my downstairs machine that's accessible to the internet over our router firewall.
The idea with this is to provide access to bigger files that we can comfortably host on xbomber.co.uk itself.

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

Privacy Errors

CA-signed SSL certs aren't really made to be applied to home servers and devices. This is why router control panels don't normally secure their connections with SSL.
If you connect to Krystal over HTTPS (with SSL), the browser will throw a privacy error.
In that case, click Advanced > "Proceed (unsafe)".
The connection will be encrypted: just your browser has no 3rd-party source telling it that that Krystal is what it says it is.

About the Box

It's a bit of a coincidence that my home server got called "Krystal" back in 2012, as that's the hosting company that we use.
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 right away.
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.

Privacy Errors

About the Box

The Game

Game Media

Quick Links