First of all, this site has absolutely NO Star Trek related content AT ALL! Its merely done in a Star Trek-ish theme. People expecting Star Trek content, go visit StarTrek.com or something.

This is my network, the internal home network of Richard Gellman. It has recently been opened up to the public slightly for use by his friends. The nature of the network, a little of its history, and the services running will be described here

The network started in 1998, with the creation of "server1". Server1 was a simple server running on a 486DX4/100 with 16Mb of RAM. Due to instability, the Windows 95 on it crashed regularly, and it wasn't used much. Following a system upgrade to the primary machine, server1 was upgraded to a P166+ with 24Mb and it ran well. After some time, I decided to deal with networking concepts in Linux, and removed Windows 95, and installed Slackware 3.15.

Ater some time, around 2001-ish, a theme for the network was introduced. The "main workstation" became Enterprise, and server1 became Reliant (notice the Star Trek theme yet?). Soon after, a 486 box was introduced to the network to become a DOS Games box, called Grissom. Grissom would run on a BNC/Co-axial based subnet, instead of a Cat-5/RJ-45 based network like Enterprise had been, although initially Enterprise too ran on co-axial cables, until a 100Mbps network upgraded forced a media change. Grissom uses the 486 originally in server1, but a new motherboard (sourced from ebay) which fixed the instability issues.

A donation of a Performa 6205CD Macintosh from a good friend in the USA created the existence of Excelsior, with a 75Mhz chip, and 64Mb of RAM. This is used as a Mac workstation.

A donation of a SparcStation IPX from a good friend in Canada resulted in Regula. Regula took over mail and DNS duties from Reliant, although at this time, mail was running in an outgoing only capacity, as the dialup connection only offered a 2 hour IP address.

Spare parts resulting from an upgraded on Enterprise, resulted in the creation of Saratoga, a Linux workstation. During the Summer of 2002, a stock-take revealed suficient components to upgrade Reliant, resulting in Reliant II, with 64MB of RAM (stolen from Saratoga, reducing it to 192Mb), and a Celeron 366 processor.

A trip to New York to see some good online friends resulting in the introduction of Vulcan and Praxxis, two donations from two different people. Vulcan is a Sun JavaStation-1, a diskless Network Computer with 64Mb of RAM, and Praxxis is an LC475 Macintosh, with (initially) 12MB of RAM total. Vulcan has taken over DNS duties from Regula, and Praxxis has taken over web serving from Reliant, although Reliant still handles secure http connections.

A laptop was purchased in July 2002, which was named Copernicus. An MMX-233 with 32Mb of RAM.

A system was donated by my next door neighbour, and was found to be in poor state of repairs. The front panel wires were melted, and the graphics card was found to be faulty, as well as an unstable P-120 chip. Both were replaced with spares, including the motherboard and chip that used to be in Reliant. This machine is called Farpoint, and is used for playing Wipeout 2097, which has a bug that makes it unplayable on faster CPUs.

There are two more machines of little importance, Gallileo, an Acorn Archimedes A4000 with 12Mhz of chp and (initially 2Mb of RAM), and Defiant, an Amstrad 1640 system with 640K of RAM and an 8086 8Mhz chip. Defiant is used for EPROM programming/reading use.

Recent developments have been the upgrade of RAM in Gallileo to 4Mb, and in Praxxis to 20Mb total, as well as replacing Praxxis' 68LC040 processor with a full 68040 (and overclocking from 25Mhz to 40Mhz)

Reliant is also know as "The Central Server", since it operates most of the network. Reliant runs the icecast/ices system, and provides all logon authentication for Linux, Windows, and MacOS on the network. Reliant is also the network central router, and also handles the ADSL internet connection. Reliant also serves secure web content, and also hosts the webmail interface. Reliant runs the webcam, which is on continuously, as well as dealing with the network filestore, facilitated by Samba, NFS, and AppleTalk (NetaTalk). Reliant is also the network boot server for Vulcan. Reliant is a Celeron 366 with 64Mb of RAM, and a 10Gb and 20GB hard disks. It runs Linux 2.4.18 (Slackare 8.0)

Regula is the mail server. It runs Exim to deliver and receive email. Regula is a SparcStation IPX with a 40Mhz 86903 chip. 64Mb of RAM and a 500Mb SCSI hard disk. It runs OpenBSD 3.1/sparc.

Vulcan is the DNS server. It's running BIND9, and network boots off of Reliant. Vulcan has 64Mb of RAM, and runs NetBSD1.6/sparc.

Praxxis is the web server, and is running Apache 2 with PHP 4 and Samba for file access. Praxxis is a Macintosh LC475 with 20Mb of RAM, ans a 2Gb SCSI hard disk. It is running NetBSD1.6/mac68k.

And as for the workstations: Enterprise runs Windows 2000, Excelsior runs MacOS 9.1, Saratoga runs Linux 2.4.18 (Slackware 8.0), Farpoint runs Windows 95 OSR2, Grissom runs MS-DOS 6.2, and optionally Windows 95 OSR2, Defiant runs MS-DOS 6.2, Copernicus runs Windows 98 Second Edition, Gallileo runs RiscOS 3.11.

The status of the network can be seen from clicking on the "Network Status" link above.