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pseydtonneYou've heard my woe-laden scream festivals with a certain shell account provider. I have been paying this company for years of service but the past year has shown me they may no longer want my business. I trust they will consider my $120 per year a pittance since it will stop recurring in 2006.
What triggered my decision to make my move to my own server official? I looked up their server's specs.
I suppose we just outgrew each other. When I signed up with them, I saw their advertisement on TV ("Call 888-get-eighteen-ninety-five", which was their monthly rate for several years) and felt like the heavens opened up. I had tried AOL for a couple weeks in the fall of 1996, when the signup discs were still floppies but the CD was starting to dominate. This was after college when I was in withdrawal from the Internet and wound up feeling the equally annoyed.
I liked that their offices were in downtown Utica across from the theater where I graduated high school. I liked that they were fine with letting me set up my own winsock PPP and dialing in without their software (in the days of Windows 95, this was rare). I liked that I did not have the same stories everyone else told of losing the connection every few minutes. I could spend hours connected and contented. I liked that they offered me a discount only a few months into my subscription: pay a year at a time for the price of nine months. I liked having an unlimited dial-up connection. I liked not having to think about being online. I liked that it prevented the phone from ringing thus keeping my home free from calls from crackheads.
The ISP had once been a BBS. It got bought by an independent phone company and became a stable house of connectivity. They even started offering DSL for their phone line subscribers (but only after I had moved to Boston). They gave me the world I was missing while I was stuck in Utica.
Then I moved here and split the cable modem bill with my roomie. I learned how to modify my computer when I installed the network card. I kept using the email address because it meant I had a shell account to a Solaris box. When the ISP raised their rates, I called to negotiate a different deal to keep my shell account. This led me to my present state.
It turns out they've been changing all of this time. Their focus has remained local -- a little too local. They stopped keeping the server in good condition, which I learned when it went down one Friday and it took a good few phone calls to learn it would not be back up until Monday. The server was not particularly important to them: its mail files were no longer visible from the local drive. I could no longer tell how much space I was using for my email. I was keeping my mail on the server and they were not interested in me doing that. My local mail clients (Outlook Express, Evolution) kept failing, so I was not interested in changing my plans. Pine was good enough for me.
I became too accustomed to their way of semi-working. I knew enough to set up my own server but I never gave it a try. I was worried I would not have their experience, their stability, their redundancy of equipment, their scale.
Last night I got bored and typed something into my ISP's server I ask a lot of my customers to type into their servers: 'uname -a'. This Unix command tells you the local name of the computer, its operating system and the name of the hardware type. On a Linux box the hardware type may only be 'i686' (a Pentium 2 or higher). On Solaris (Sun's flavor of Unix), you get the model name of the computer. For example, I have an Ultra AXI in my baker's rack which shows up as "SPARCUltra AXI". I know it has a 440 MHz 64-bit processor and 1 GB of RAM but that comes from another set of details.
'uname -a' told me that this server, which has had the same Message of the Day (motd) since September 10th, 2001 (creepy, eh? It reminds me every time I log in), is running Solaris 8. This isn't too old. However, the machine itself is a SPARCStation 5.
Those of you familiar with Sun equipment may go "oh wow" right away. For the rest of you, this is a desktop workstation from nearly a decade ago. At its fastest, it could run 170 MHz. It can handle up to 256 MB of RAM. It looks like a pizza box.
I've been depending on a single-processor computer that I wouldn't want to play with for all of my email access. Not only could I build a faster machine for the job: I already have its faster sibling in my apartment awaiting setup. The mask is off. I could just as easily depend on myself.
Now my task is clear. My prowess is too great to shirk this duty. I shall have pseydtonne dot net set up before the summer is out, possibly in the next couple weekends. I must avenge myself.
-avoid what leads me to fear, Dante
What triggered my decision to make my move to my own server official? I looked up their server's specs.
I suppose we just outgrew each other. When I signed up with them, I saw their advertisement on TV ("Call 888-get-eighteen-ninety-five", which was their monthly rate for several years) and felt like the heavens opened up. I had tried AOL for a couple weeks in the fall of 1996, when the signup discs were still floppies but the CD was starting to dominate. This was after college when I was in withdrawal from the Internet and wound up feeling the equally annoyed.
I liked that their offices were in downtown Utica across from the theater where I graduated high school. I liked that they were fine with letting me set up my own winsock PPP and dialing in without their software (in the days of Windows 95, this was rare). I liked that I did not have the same stories everyone else told of losing the connection every few minutes. I could spend hours connected and contented. I liked that they offered me a discount only a few months into my subscription: pay a year at a time for the price of nine months. I liked having an unlimited dial-up connection. I liked not having to think about being online. I liked that it prevented the phone from ringing thus keeping my home free from calls from crackheads.
The ISP had once been a BBS. It got bought by an independent phone company and became a stable house of connectivity. They even started offering DSL for their phone line subscribers (but only after I had moved to Boston). They gave me the world I was missing while I was stuck in Utica.
Then I moved here and split the cable modem bill with my roomie. I learned how to modify my computer when I installed the network card. I kept using the email address because it meant I had a shell account to a Solaris box. When the ISP raised their rates, I called to negotiate a different deal to keep my shell account. This led me to my present state.
It turns out they've been changing all of this time. Their focus has remained local -- a little too local. They stopped keeping the server in good condition, which I learned when it went down one Friday and it took a good few phone calls to learn it would not be back up until Monday. The server was not particularly important to them: its mail files were no longer visible from the local drive. I could no longer tell how much space I was using for my email. I was keeping my mail on the server and they were not interested in me doing that. My local mail clients (Outlook Express, Evolution) kept failing, so I was not interested in changing my plans. Pine was good enough for me.
I became too accustomed to their way of semi-working. I knew enough to set up my own server but I never gave it a try. I was worried I would not have their experience, their stability, their redundancy of equipment, their scale.
Last night I got bored and typed something into my ISP's server I ask a lot of my customers to type into their servers: 'uname -a'. This Unix command tells you the local name of the computer, its operating system and the name of the hardware type. On a Linux box the hardware type may only be 'i686' (a Pentium 2 or higher). On Solaris (Sun's flavor of Unix), you get the model name of the computer. For example, I have an Ultra AXI in my baker's rack which shows up as "SPARCUltra AXI". I know it has a 440 MHz 64-bit processor and 1 GB of RAM but that comes from another set of details.
'uname -a' told me that this server, which has had the same Message of the Day (motd) since September 10th, 2001 (creepy, eh? It reminds me every time I log in), is running Solaris 8. This isn't too old. However, the machine itself is a SPARCStation 5.
Those of you familiar with Sun equipment may go "oh wow" right away. For the rest of you, this is a desktop workstation from nearly a decade ago. At its fastest, it could run 170 MHz. It can handle up to 256 MB of RAM. It looks like a pizza box.
I've been depending on a single-processor computer that I wouldn't want to play with for all of my email access. Not only could I build a faster machine for the job: I already have its faster sibling in my apartment awaiting setup. The mask is off. I could just as easily depend on myself.
Now my task is clear. My prowess is too great to shirk this duty. I shall have pseydtonne dot net set up before the summer is out, possibly in the next couple weekends. I must avenge myself.
-avoid what leads me to fear, Dante
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 12:55 pm (UTC)heh, dude, didn’t that guy give you a Sparc 5 in the parking lot? just run that as your shell box instead, and use a beefier machine as the mail server.
glad you’re getting around to this project.
-steve
no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 06:13 pm (UTC)Bumper sticker for your punchbuggy:
Date: 2005-08-01 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-03 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-06 03:56 pm (UTC)I got your phone message at work. I also left your phone number at work. D'oh! I was sick for 2 days (Monday and Tuesday), so didn't get your message until Wednesday, and then had to make up so much work. Book going to press, blah, blah, blah. Kept on meaning to call and kept on being too busy. Feh.
If you get this, call me again. I do not have your number. I am getting off the phone now...
E