This page was carefully ported from googly.org, in memorium of The Empire's web site, but mostly because it's at least moderately funny. It's open for additions if you've got history to share — just email it to me and I'll get it posted.
A long, long, time ago, in a galaxy far away...err...on FullFeed La Crosse and GeoCities web servers, the cyber-nations of Jefferonia and Chuckoslavokia existed for a short while. There was war, and peace, and war, and peace, and war, and, well, you get the picture. After a while we got sick of all the flame mail and llama attacks and formed:
This was way to much spelling and typing, so when the webmaster got sick of all the work he changed the name to:
This is much speedier to key. Soon after the merge the site moved from FullFeed La Crosse to FreeServers, where it existed for much too long. FreeServers offers very good web services, for a free provider, but they are free, and they do impose significant limits. So when we went from just a cyber empire with goals of world domination to:
Which was again too much to type and was again shortened by the webmaster to:
A cyber youth group with goals of world domination, we just needed more freedom in our web services, so the webmaster produced a server. An old Apple Quadra 650 with 40 MB of RAM, a 250 MB hard drive, and a 66MHz MC68040 processor. These are not the most impressive specifications, but they made management of the mail and web services, as Dave would say, insanely easy, at least in comparison to FreeServers. We ha d local disk space, a freeware version of a professional HTTP server, our own freeware mail server, and a simple mailing list. Life seemed so wonderful until we added a few more users and got a serious:
Resulting from the over-use of a slow, old machine with cheap software. This prompted the webmaster to plan a new, customized, multi-machine server. His dreams were grand. His budget was not. To make a long story short, we didn't get a new server. We had some parts here, and some there, and no way at all to make them function as a server. However, some of the parts were compatible with the existing hardware, and we upgraded from a Quadra 650 to a:
The Empire adopted a highway in here somewhere. It's not exactly an electronic superhighway, but it's a highway nonetheless. Adopting a highway isn't supposed to be hard, but it took us two applications to the La Crosse County Department of Transportation, a nice long chat with a La Crosse County Sheriff, and 4 months. Even then we didn't get the highway we wanted. As it turns out, the DOT employees adopted it 6 months later, which would explain why we didn't get it. I personally find the electronic history more intersting, so let's get back to that.
It's not a giant leap, but moving from 68k to PPC allowed significant changes in the software. We kept the 40 MB of RAM, but upgraded to a 66MHz 601 processor and 1 GB of hard disk space. We also got rid off all that freeware software and installed professional grade file, web, mail, list, print, DNS, and routing services. Unfortunately, 40 MB of RAM and a 66MHz processor can't handle all that, so we went back to just web, mail, and list services. Even that was wonderful though. We had a unified user database, complete remote control capabilities and a much faster machine. The Empire's internet services have remained in this state until:
As Zach finds hardware from the first server plan in his room. His dreams return to him, and he is swept away by a sultry, tall, blond...umm...server box. Anyway, that's what all the hubbub is about. The server box has gone from a dream to reality, and became fully functional in September 1999.
After retiring this machine, I've decided that it needs a bit more of a name. I never took any pictures off this beast, but I really should have. It was a beast, and it shall now be known as the "Mega Mighty Mac". This thing was 3' x 3' x 2', plywood, purple, and ugly. It held two motherboards, a 5-port hub, a cable modem, a POTS modem, 3 parallel power supplies, 8 disk drives, and a battery backup/charging system. I loved it. I hated it. When it worked it was great, and it put my fridge at just the right height. When it was broken it as a pain in the ass because it didn't move for you to work on it.
This beast took several rounds of upgrades. As I came across cash and/or hardware, the Mega Mighty Mac got a 7200 motherboard, a 7600 motherboard, more RAM, 10/100 Ethernet cards, bigger hard drives, and another power supply. Then, for no good reason, things started to fail. This lead to massive downtime because:
At least once, and often more than that. First it was the power setup. A little lazy wiring (and a lack of funds) on the last power supply upgrade, combined with the new heat of summer allowed a cascading failure that took 3 of the 4 power supplies. With 8 disk drives, two motherboards, and various other equipment, I needed more power. Unfortunately, power supplies are expensive. So I sold most of the Mega Mighty Mac, spent the procceeds on a Quadra 950 case (another monster), and put the 7600/180 in there.
This ran wonderfully, for a good three days, when the 12 V -> 3.3 V power converter failed. This component is necessary for the proper operation of the 604e processor that I had in the system, so Mighty was again down. I swapped out the 604e for a 601, which didn't need a much power, but also ran at one-third the speed. Futhermore, it didn't run linux, which is necessary for the kinds of services Mighty is expected to provide.
So I was left again with useless equipment. I replaced the 3.3 V power converter, only to find the the 7600 motherboard had been fried. Somewhere in here I also lost 16 MB of RAM, a 2 GB SCSI disk, a NIC, and probably some other stuff. After the first 10 or 15 failures I lost track. In any case, I grabbed my working RAM and disks, and sold the remainder of Mighty Mac once again.
As luck would have it, I sold the working components of Mighty Mac at a high enough price to cover a complete new system. Mighty Mac is a little more humble looking now, but it's not less powerful. The new Mighty Mac had no case, an Apple 7300 motherboard with a 180 MHz 604e processor, 112 MB of RAM in 8 DIMMs, and three 9.1 GB SCSI disks.
The new Mighy Mac served hard through more than two years of abuse. She did get a few upgrades along the way — 10k SCSI drives, a new power supply, and half the case of a 7600. Alas, even that is not even for a modern web server, and Mighty (and the name) finally bowed out to:
Angus is our new, modern web server. She's named in association with MacGyver who sits next to her, and she boasts an Asus A7V600 motherboard with the VIA KT600 chipset, both running under an AMD Duron 1.6 GHz processor and 512 MB of DDR RAM. The A7V600 motherboard is pretty cool — in addition to all the features I'll never use, it's got things like SATA (with hardware RAID) and a 3Com 1000 Mbit Ethernet controller.
Angus has also got a match set of 3 HP 9.1 GB SCSI disks, any they are now attached to an IBM ServeRAID II controller, giving Angus the Power of RAID®. Along side the main SCSI disks, she's got a 40 GB IDE drive for /tmp space, and a snazzy new 15/30 GB tape drive for backups. Okay, so technically the tape drive belongs to Cynic by Trade, but it's installed in Angus, so she's taking credit.
profplump@uberzach.com
Page last updated: May 15, 2004 @ 10:44 AM PDT
© 1997-2012 Zachary P. Kotlarek