Hardware at phfactor.net

Hardware

These boxes are (pause for a moment of silence) retired as of 7/2/02. Proximate reason was a drive failure in the mailserver; replacing them with a single PC reduced component counts enormously and sped everything up.

As of 2006, hardware is an Athlon 64, 1GB of memory in an Antec Sonata II case. Hardware SATA RAID5, DSL, firewall, the usual trimmings. Debian-based Linux OS.

From 7/02 to 12/02, we had my old box - a Soyo D6-IBA dual P3 motherboard, with one chip due to CPU failure. (a Katmai 450 overclocked to 504) 512MB of memory, onboard SCSI with tape drive and CD-R. 2x Maxtor 30G IDE and 1x Maxtor 80G IDE on a Promise UDMA 100 card, plus an old 24X CDROM on the motherboards' IDE.

Bye, Bye, SMP

As of 12/12/02, the Soyo died a horrendous death and has also been replaced. The main server is now a Asus motherboard, A7N266-VM, with 512MB of CAS2 (Crucial) DDR2100, an Athlon XP 1700, and AMD's retail chip fan. Oh yeah, I put in one of the Thermaltake copper CPU shims - I quite like those.

I couldn't get the onboard RealTek 8100 ethernet working (It's incompatible with both of the kernel 8139 drivers), so networking is my trusty DEC Tulip 21140. Paired 80G IDE drives in RAID0 for the file server, and a 30G for the system disk.

New picture as time permits.

Interestingly, all of these were on filtered power, via a large Topaz ferroresonant transformer. So I don't think it was power. I'm pretty annoyed with the Soyo; it was a premium board when I bought it in 98. Onboard SCSI and so forth. Maybe the CPU replacement killed it. Wouldn't that be ironic, eh?

Internet connection

I used Earthlink for a couple of years, and quite liked it. I upgraded Speakeasy a few months ago (Spe 2004) to get their 6 megabit/768k service. At the time, the fastest I could get from Earthlink was 3 megabit. You should see 80kbytes/sec from here, which is acceptable most of the time.

DNS is outsourced to EveryDNS. Free, so-far reliable, fast. I used UltraDNS for several years, but in 2008 I switched to EveryDNS; details are here.

New! Slower DSL! As of sometime early 2007, I dropped to 3Mbit/768kbit DSL, as it was no longer reimbursed. Bummer for me, same for y'all.

Firewalls

I used to use a Sun box running OpenBSD and pf; that's now off to live with a friend in Illinois. I'll run OpenBSD again once I can find a cheap machine that doesn't make noise.

Old setup:
I like defense in depth. There's an IP-less filtering bridge on the front end, backed by a port-forwarding NAT box. Seems to be a decent combo, and I'm just now learning what you can do with the bridge rules.

News / Status

11/2004 Added Project Honeypot to the domain.
11/2004 Replacing ubercool ultrasparc/openbsd firewall with a Linksys box running modified firmware. No hard drive, no moving parts, much less power. Not as cool, but very compelling.
12/12/02 New CPU, motherboard, memory, restore from backups. Looks like the motherboard (Soyo) failed badly - drive corruption, failure to boot with drives plugged in, quite bad.
12/02/02 Upgraded CPU to P3/550
10/5/02 Added CD-R to the server, required Much SCSI Effort. Of all the times to be lacking a goat sacrifice!
8/02 Added 2x 30G IDE in RAID-0 array, currently a scratch monkey for testing Amanda.
7/1/02 to 7/2/02 Upgraded webserver in Great Consolidation. No more Sparc, alas, now a PC.
4/23/02 Added Google search.
10/27/01 Posted updated picture and information, added new disk for mail spool, and upgraded the webserver from an IPC to an LX.

Contact information

You can reach the webmaster at this email address.

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