Networked Hosts

• Linux Server (tux) - A 400Mhz PII with 640MB of RAM and over 135GB of storage, this machine was the heart of SkilmNET. Apart from being an E-Mail server, an FTP server, and the Webserver for the pages I hosted, it was also my personal toy for learning about Linux and server administration in general. Tux's name comes from the lovable Linux mascot. Tux also held the uptime record for SkilmNET with over 184 days without a reboot (this is a BIG deal to nerds).
• Router/DHCP Server (vesta) - Long, long ago, this was the machine I used during the Radio Show that I used to do at a friend's house. Later, I turned it into a Linux machine in my room for playing around and listening to MP3s, etc. For a few months, it sat in a pile of dust, but I saved it again. Vesta (a Pentium 100Mhz with 40MB RAM) became my development/testing machine. For a while, it served as the DHCP server, Internal DNS, and NTP (Time) server for the network, and was to be testing Samba and NIS configurations for later use. Now, In addition to being the DHCP, NTP, and External DNS server, vesta is the gateway router for SkilmNET, replacing the rather limited Linksys Etherfast I used before. vesta borrows her name from the Roman goddess of the home and hearth.
• Pete's First iMac (pomona) - Named for the Roman goddess of Apples (get it?), pomona was my more practical, and multimedia enabled replacement for sparky. I love that it fits nicely on my desk and that it's a really great graphics and video editing platform. The built-in DVD burner is a plus as well. If you get a chance to check out Mac OS X, you really should because not only is it based on UNIX, but it's a pretty-looking system with an easy-to-use feature set.
• Sun SPARCstation 20 (sparky) - sparky used to be one of my favorite machines, not only is it a UNIX machine, but it is a fairly out-there architecture - Sun Microsystems' SPARC - with 4 processors. Not many people have a SPARC machine at home (or a multi-processor machine of any type for that matter), so I thought that was pretty cool :-). Anyway, sparky got old, tempermental, loud, and hot. This all started happening about the time that I started pseudo-working-for-Apple, so I decided to replace sparky with a more powerful (and also UNIX-based) iMac. As a result, sparky was tucked away in storage for a few months until I re-did my room. sparky now sits proudly on my desk, with a fresh install of Solaris 2.6.
• NeXTstation Mono (blackhole) - I couldn't resist picking up this machine on eBay. Built in 1992, its an old 68k NeXT workstation. 25Mhz Motorola 68030 processor and 20MB of RAM. It is also a 4-shades-of-grey screen. No color here baby! Right now, it is running NeXTStep 3.0 and I have no plans to change that.