My Network
You can tell alot about a man by the technology he keeps. To that end:
Internet Link
I just recently upgraded from Speakeasy.net 1.5/768 ADSL to Verizon FiOS, quite possibly the least-evil service to be offered by a evil telco in my lifetime. I loved Speakeasy’s service and their ‘do what you will’ philosophy, but they say every man has his price; turns out mine is 30Mbs/s.
Router – wintermute
Wintermute is my old Sony VAIO PCV-90, resurrected under OpenBSD 3.7 as the router/firewall/NAT. It’s a Pentium 200Mhz, with 64MB of RAM and a 14GB IDE hard drive with which I replaced the original 3GB drive. Even weak though it is, OpenBSD flies.
I use pf as my firewall, and I’ve used its altq functionality to prioritize SSH, IM, and TCP PSH packets over everything, and prioritize most traffic over anything to or from my P2P boxes.
I also log all blocked IP packets, and submit the log to dshield each time it rotates. You DO send D-Shield your firewall logs, right?
Primary Workstation – wyoh
Wyoh is an Alienware Area 51 M5790, a 2.14Ghz Core 2 Duo laptop with a brilliant 17″ 1920×1200 LCD display, dual 100GB 7200 RPM SATA drives w/ Intel Matrix RAID, a Radeon X1800 PCI-Express graphics board, wireless, and the shittiest laptop keyboard of the century. It also has a neat glowing alien head on the lid.
Wyoh runs XP SP2, with VMs for other OSes as I need them. As much as I like Linux and FreeBSD, I’m primarily a Microsoft developer, and even Eclipse hasn’t..erm…eclipsed Visual Studio.NET as an IDE. Never mind the fact that C# and ASP.NET are vastly superior to Java and J2EE/JSP. And don’t even mention PHP.
My MP3 player is Musicmatch Winamp Foobar2000. My programmer’s editor Visual Slickedit 10 11, with a heavily modified CUA keymap. I use Mozilla Firefox 1.0.x 1.5 2.0.x for web browsing, Thunderbird/IMAP Google for Domains for email, and I’ve not yet settled on an RSS reader, though I’m evaluating Rojo Google Reader at the moment.
I use Kinesis Classic QD keyboard, a Logitec wireless trackball, and an Aeron chair.
Old, Secondary Workstation – prospertine
Prospertine is a Shuttle SB81P, which I tricked out w/ 3 Western Digital 10k RPM 74GB SATA drives, using the built-in RAID controller to stripe two of them. I added a Litescribe DVD+/-RW, PCI-Express x16 ATI Radeon X800 XL, and 2GB of PC3200 DDR RAM. She’s where I used to do all my primary computing activities, and she rocked.
She runs Windows XP SP2 with all the latest patches, and runs it fairly well considering it’s XP.
Tertiary Workstation / Loaner – artemis
Artemis, my aging but still vigorous old workstation, is a Dell Precision Workstation 400, circa Summer 2000. She has two PIII 933Mhz processors, 768MB of PC800 RDRAM, and two RAID 0 volumes, each made of two U160 SCSI drives of varying capacities and models. I’ve also got a sinfully slow 80GB IDE drive in a spare drive bay, for storing all of my virtual machines.
For display, I have one ATI Radeon 7600 64MB DDR in the AGP4x slot, and a (don’t laugh) 3Dfx Voodoo 3 in the PCI slot. One 21″ CRT is attached to each video card (I’ve been dual-headed since 2000, and will never go back).
Antique Laptop – Hera
Hera is a Dell Inspiron 7000, PII 300Mhz with 192MB RAM and a 16GB hard drive. Lately I’ve been running OpenBSD 4.1 on her, since that’s the only non-Windows OS that seems to work well with my Ralink WiFi card.
Gratuitously huge file server – Nemes
Nemes is a Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ storage appliance, packed with four 750GB SATA drives for a total of just over 2.0TB of usable redundant storage. Nemes has GigE and jumbo frames support, has CIFS, AFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP/S, and rsync support, and generally rocks. Nemes has replaced aenea as my primary storage system.
Old Gratuitously huge file server – Aenea
Aenea is a home-built P4 box running FreeBSD 6.0-stable amd64 Ubuntu Feisty Fawn amd64, w/ 1GB of DDR DRAM, and a 1TB (that’s right, tera) RAID 5 volume composed of 5 250GB Hitachi DeskStar SATA-II drives. Though it took a feat of engineering to get the Highpoint RocketRaid 2220 PCI-X SATA-II RAID controller to work with HighPoint’s ubershitty drivers, she’s pretty stable now. Aenea used to be my NAS back when she ran FreeBSD, but now that’s Nemes’ job, so Aenea has been repurposed as a dedicated Azureus box.
General purpose machine – Boromir
Boromir is a Dell Dimension XPS D300, w/ a 300Mhz PII processor and 168 MB RAM. Boromir has an old RAID card with some PATA drives in it, which I use for disk-to-disk backup from my gratuitously huge file servers. Boromir’s SSH port is also exposed via my firewall, so I can SSH into my home network from work.
Source Control Server – Actinium
Actinium is a home-brew POS box I got from a previous employer. It’s a Pentium II 600, with 256MB of non-ECC DRAM, with a bad bit somewhere causing occassional reboots. It has a 40GB HDD.
Actinium runs RedHat Linux 8, because one has to know one’s enemy. Though I keep actinium at the console, I occassionally load a KDE desktop onto artemis using the Cygwin X server.
Actinium’s primary role is to provide revision control services for Cryptos Mobile Systems, the company I co-founded. For source control, we use Perforce 2003, which is so vastly better than CVS it’s embarassing. Since it’s the source control box, I try not to stress actinium with anything else, lest it buckle.
UPDATE: Actinium has finally stopped booting, a testament to lowest-bidder Korean engineering. No matter; I’ve moved on to SVN hosted on my Dreamhost account anyway.
App server – aragorn
Aragorn was hosting my 125GB RAID array on Windows 2003 Server until it stopped playing nice w/ the W2k3 RAID driver and I had to put it down. Now it has three ralink PCI wifi cards and runs kismet, but only to detect unauthorized intrusions into my wireless network.
The Virtual Computers
I’ve been a big fan of VMware since I bought version 2.0 of VMware workstation way back in ’98 or ’99. It’s come a long way since then, and I’ve come with it. I keep a hard drive of VM’s for those OS’es I use, but not often enough to dedicate a machine. I have hotsoup-p2p where I run all my skanky P2P apps, and hotsoup-vs2k5 where I run beta and CTP builds of Visual Studio 2005 in advance of its release.
Colo Boxes
I keep one box, Achilles, at a colo facility run by CI Host in Dallas. Achilles is a 1U CyberTron box w/ a P4 2.8Ghz processor, 2GB of PC3200 DDR DRAM, and a 250GB ATA RAID0 volume.
Achilles doesn’t host any network services himself; he runs VMWare GSX Server on Windows Server 2003, and runs a handful of virtual servers therein:
- There’s carlotta, the W2k3 server for asp.net apps and such
- Ender runs OpenBSD 3.7, postfix, and courier-imap, to provide mail services for apocryph.org
- Bonzo runs FreeBSD 5.4, and hosts www.apocryph.org, my gallery, and any other unix app I want to play with
- Jane also runs FreeBSD 5.4, and exists soley to store backups from the other machines on her generous 90GB virtual disk
- Tor runs OpenBSD 3.6, and runs a Tor node
UPDATE: I finally got sick of C I Host and their sundry bullshit. Achilles is coming home, and I have a Dreamhost account for my hosting needs now, including this site.
Embedded Computers
In addition to the PC hardware, I run a few embedded network-aware eval boards, including the TINIm400 eval board for the DS80C400 Ethernet/Java/IP 8051 on steroids, and the Rabbit 3000 microcontroller with built-in Ethernet, TCP/IP, and a lame, emasculated C-like programming language.