Good Lord, Why?

People often ask if I (cough) have any advice for young people. No, wait, that's William Burroughs. People often ask me "So, just how many computers do you have at home?" Well, the numerical answer seems to keep changing. One month it's this and a month later it's that. The next question they usually ask (not surprisingly) is "What do you do with all of them?" Well, to put it simply, I use them. What do you do with your home computer? Keep your bank account records? Play Games? Let the kids play games and mess with your account info? You do something with it, right? Well, so do I.

I guess the best answer I have for the "Why?" question is "Because, I like it and I'm a hardware fiend." It's all simple enough to do and since I have the hardware to do it with, I might as well.

How'd you do it?

When I moved into my previous dwelling, and had more than just one computer that wanted to talk to the world, I decided to go for broke. I bought an 8-port twisted-pair hub and some good pre-made cables. I also had to get two PCI 10Mbit cards because some of my old WD8003's didn't want to play nice. A simple naming sceme, RFC 1918, and everything was talking nicely amongst themselves. The next step was to setup a dialup box with PPP and IP masquerading. I had never done either of these before, but, luckily, I happen to possess rudimentary reading and comprehension skills. After reading the HOWTO's on both topics, I implemented what I had learned and everything worked great! For awhile, I had replaced the PPP connection with a DSL line from US West and everything was much cooler. I've even added an 8-port switch so that my main machines can talk to each other at 100Mbit full-duplex. Now I'm talking to the world via wireless radio so as to avoid the telco, and using ipchains.

Cthulhu

Cthulhu is a PII-450 with 256MB RAM, a 16MB STB video card and a 21" Hitachi-tubed monitor. I use Cthulhu mostly for playing games, especially network games like Master of Orion II, Starcraft, Pax Imperia and Homeworld. When it isn't playing games it's running RedHat Linux (KRUD, actually). It also has the largest monitor in the house so it's obviously my main workstation.

I usually build my own machines from scratch but I must be getting lazy as I bought this one from Dell. I've used their workstations and servers in the past and have been quite happy with them so I thought that there was no better place to buy one from. However, that doesn't mean I won't build my own any more. If you'd like to build your own, check out this place for some quality tips. Tom's Hardware Guide is also a must for info.

Yog-Sothoth

Yog-Sothoth is a dual P-200 that is usually running the most current version of RedHat Linux. It was acting as my firewall for over a year until I decided to retire it from the front line. Taking it down also gave me the long-needed opportunity I needed to do a fresh install as the filesystems were a little too out of whack.

Physically, Yog-Sothoth is a dual P200 on a Tyan Tomcat IV motherboard. It has 64MB of RAM, an old NE2000 NIC and a couple middling sized drives. Right now it's running 2.2.14 and I'm trying to sort out some strange crashes it's been experiencing. To create a load, I'm running seti@home on it.

Nyarlothotep

Nyarlothotep is a Celeron 300A. Its main job is to act as a firewall for my house. It's using a Kingston DC 21041 NIC to talk to the router and an Intel EEPro 10/100 to talk to the internal network at full speed (100Mbit full-duplex).

I've been tossing the idea around with remaking Nyarlothotep using a non-intel architecture with no local disks. It would mount root over read-only NFS and log via secure syslog, both to an internal machine. It would basically become an appliance which would boot from a read-only floppy and be pretty crack-proof. Should the system get cracked, a simple reboot would clear the problem. I'm sure there are some flaws with the design currently and I'll have to work them out, but using a non-intel machine should cut down on the chances of a rootkit or script kiddie getting in and doing anything harmful.

Nodens

Nodens is my little buddy. He's a 386/40 with 32MB RAM, a 200MB drive and is my favorite box. He's also running RedHat 5.0 with a 2.0.33 kernel. I harvested most of him from spare parts at a former place of employment and put him to work outside the firewall there doing some simple monitoring and providing a secure platform from which to monitor external traffic on that network. He had really nice uptimes and only ever came down for new kernels and facility moves. All of that with only 8MB of RAM! They didn't want him when I left so he came home with me. Oh, and yes, the power switch is indeed off in this photo. This picture was taken during a blackout. Nodens is now in a new house and on a big UPS, so he should be fine for the next hew years.

Nodens has a record uptime of 566 days (and some small number of hours). I was participating in the uptime couter here but the jiffies rolled over and threw me back to 1 day at somewhere over 400 days of uptime. The client is supposed to account for this now and correct itself.

Right now, Nodens is helping out with the RC5 challenge being held by distributed.net. He's cranking out about 20,000 keys per second. It would be mighty cool if this machine were the one to crack RC5.

To find out why, read the life story of Nodens.

Cthugha

Cthugha is a replacement for an old twin brother of Nodens. It's a P-133 with 48MB RAM. I upgraded the video and sound cards in Cthulhu and put the old ones in Cthugha. It was serving as a game machine until the Quantum drive decided to croak. Then I got an Adaptec SCSI controller and added a few old 4GB drives to it. Now Chtugha is going to start being a DB/NFS server for some application that I haven't decided on yet. It's running Redhat Linux 6.1 (KRUD again). It also serves as jukebox for playing CD audio and MP3's.

Ithaqua

Ithaqua is the machine that Cthulhu replaced. It's a P-150 with 64MB RAM, a 6MB Intergraph3D Voodoo video card and a couple largish drives in it. It also has a Soundblaster PCI64. It's setup as a game machine and network station for my roomate to use. It also has a scanner attached to it. It doesn't do much but read email and play solitaire.

Stinky

Stinky is an IBM Thinkpad 365XD notebook. It talks to the network through a 3Com 3C589D PCMCIA card, or an old DEC card I found somewhere. I drag it around and plug it into the few pieces of ethernet I've extended around the house. Most often, it's in the living room on the coffee table. The other common hangout for it is on the dining room table. I've also got it setup for a couple different networks and can switch between them quite easily using the cardctl command. The only thing that really stinks about it is the display: it's 640x480 at 8bpp. I can squeeze 4 xterms on it though, so it's better than nothing. Reading news is it's most common use.

I've also configured it to use DHCP, using the pcmcia tools and dhcpcd, so I can plug it in at work and at some friends' homes. I've actually taken it to my employers' company headquarters in California and plugged in with no difficulty, which would have freaked a few IT monkeys out if they had seen it.

Stinky also acts as a firewall when the need arises, using his blazingly quick 28.8 modem to connect to an ISP.

Azathoth

Azathoth is my shiny new Thinkpad. It's a 240 and is pretty sweet. It's a 300MHz Celeron with 128MB RAM. The display is small at 10 inches, but it's less than an inch thick and weighs less than three pounds. Very small and easy to use. It's dual booting Win98 and Linux as I have need for both environments using this little guy.

It's display is better than Stinky's at 800x600x16bpp and it's quite snappy - the NeoMagic chipset is very nice. The name Azathoth used to be used by the largest piece of hardware I had, a Sun SparcServer 670MP. I gave it away to someone who needed desperately to heat their house and it was just taking up garage space. Now the name is in use by the smallest machine in the house (not counting palmtops).

Hastur

Hastur is a nice little gem too. It's an honest to goodness NeXTstation. One of the originals with a B&W 17" monitor that has a microphone and speaker inside. It's an M68040 with 40MB RAM. I did a hardware trade with a friend for an old 486/33, a monitor, and a bunch of other stuff that I wasn't using. He wasn't using it so the trade went pretty good for both of us. I don't use it for a lot but it is cool to fire up every once in awhile. Besides, black hardware rules, and the NeXT is just too cool of a machine not to have.

Phaster

Phaster is for serious fun. It's a 233MHz DEC Multia/UDB with 88MB RAM and a 528MB drive. I've clocked the processor up to 266MHz without a single problem to date. It's running AXP/Linux from RedHat (6.0) with a 2.2.29-ac1 kernel. I got a pretty good deal on it (at the time) and I've been using it ever since. It made a great X workstation and is now working as an NFS server. The speed is comparable to a P-90 (from various bench tests) but other than that it's a kick to use and hack on. I have a more detailed page about Phaster here. Phaster isn't a name from the mythos, it's a play on the word "faster". I've nounified an adverb! Woohoo!

Other Stuff

I have some other machines that are currently not connected to the network for various reasons. I have an old 8086 that worked the last time it was in a case. The case got turned into a 386 of some unremembered vintage in an apartment I used to live in, acting as a print server and an irc terminal for a while, and has since gone far away. I don't have any plans for this one, so if you want it let me know. I also have some older 386 motherboards but they'll probably get turned into garage art or something.

I also have a Mac 512E but the CRT burned out long ago due to a cat with an overactive bladder. I'm going to turn this one into a fish tank. Some day... It's one of the Macs that has the signatures of all the engineers inside the back cover. I'm hoping that they'll show up through the plexiglass tank. I'll probably be too lazy to put real fish in it, but at least it will be doing something.

I've also thought about getting an X-10 controller from Radio Shack and experimenting with that. I've heard you can do some fairly neat things with them. If I could just get the coffee pot cronned I think I'd be happy. Maybe the lights on the fish tank, or a radio alarm in my bedroom, too.