Nix Bits

I’ve had a few questions lately about my lab. I no longer host NOLUG on my personal equipment. My company OTIS hosts it on a FreeBSD box that Mikey and I set up. Nonetheless I do have a pretty extensive little personal lab for testing and development.

My primary workstation is an Athlon with 512M RAM. I’ve run Debian unstable on this box since I built it. It’s for burning Cd’s and just generally workstation and development. It’s got a GeForce2 and decent sound as well. One thing I’ve learned the hard way about early Athlons is that they run hot. I burned up two good motherboards on this thing; the capacitors around the CPU just melted.

I also have an old PII-233 which was my second Linux workstation. The first was a 486 running Slackware 2.1 then Debian Hamm and is long gone. It’s been running FreeBSD since the 3.x days and is currently at 4.7. This is my mailserver running postfix and UW-IMAP (internally only). It also runs apache where I typically mirror regular web content. I also use djbdns on it with IPv6 patches applied. It’s secondary dns for my domains as well as an internal DNS server for the LAN. It also handles DHCP duties. Lastly, it has a secondary harddisk with all of my mp3 archive on it. I used to stream them via a mounted NFS partition from my primary workstation but since my current job has such strict firewall restrictions I no longer do that. I rather miss my personal radio station that consisted of my entire record collection

I also have a SunBlade 100 running Solaris 9. I have a few NFS partitions on it holding the source and ports trees for my BSD boxes, which have limited disk space. Also running Sun’s build of Gnome2 on the desktop and will probably play with LDAP on it as well to see if I can implement single sign on across my little network. Plan to do that for the office so testing it out at home first will be useful. The only thing I can’t test out is integrating Windows into the SSO because I don’t have any Windows boxes.

My firewall is — believe it or not — a Packard Bell P75. I upgraded the RAM on it but not much else. It’s been running OpenBSD since 2.6 and is at the current 3.2 release now. I’ve upgraded using both binary procedure (replacing all the binaries) and using buildworld. In addition to being my pf-based firewall this box is also my Wireless LAN access point. Rather than using insecure WEP, I implemented the built in IPSEC to encrypt and authenticate the wireless link. I also have used IPSEC to VPN in to my network from the office. Also, I use freenet6.net‘s tools to get my net visible via Ip6. This box is the Ip6 router and firewall. I can go to work, fire up an IP6 tunnel, and connect to apache and ssh directly via IP6 rather than having to use NAT. At some point I will put an apache proxy on this box to get into the multiple web servers behind my firewall.

Lastly I have an old Sun Enterprise 150. It used to be a server for an ISP I worked for and is quite out of date. Unfortunately, the /var disk is dead and I just haven’t replaced it yet. Actually I have two of these beasts though one no longer works at all; the motherboard appears to be gone on that one. So at least I have a spare parts shelf. These things are also really loud and they suck power big time. Still, it is a solid fileserving platform. And these suckers did real work. We hosted nearly 200 domains mail and web on them and numerous other services. They barely blinked at the load. I have some SCSI disks now so I may resurrect this thing. Or I may grab another newer sun off of ebay some time and retire these puppies.

They’re really cool though. The motherboard(s) float in a hard foam shell. Of course these are SBUS rather than PCI. Everything is much more solid than even the modern PCI-based 250’s and the like. It’s also tons heavier than those guys. I guess it’s about vintage 1997 and would have set you back around $30K at the time. There’s one on ebay today with a “Buy it Now” link for $250. wow.

And of course I have my laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8200. The big brick with 15 inch screen and DVD. It’s large for a laptop but it’s also a workhorse and it’s really what I need.

I also have various and sundry pieces parts like anyone else who does this for a living and a hobby. I almost have enough to cobble together another (decent) PC. At some point I’ll probably move my Athlon to the front and drop in a capture card and a new video card with NTSC output and try out one of these “build your own PVR” projects.