“We do zero work and pass the markup on to you!”

Food, Folks & Pharmacology

We've grown a bit since this little project started, but we're still just a place for a small group of geeky friends to come and blow off steam, socialize, fraternize, and generally slack off. It's also advantageous to have net space outside of the workplace.

gHosts & gCools

"What are you guys on?!?"

We started with one machine, avalon, and a naming scheme (mythical or destroyed cities). Things have been coming along slowly, but here's a partial list of machines that are at least partially running.

Avalon -- The mist shrouded isle of the Druids.

DEC Alpha Universal Desktop Box, RedHat Linux. Our first box, and still the main work horse, though we'll be off-loading some essential services to some of the m68k boxes. After 8 months of pain and suffering (and avoiding the issue) we FINALLY succeeded in compiling the CMU hacked version of Kerberos (v4) for Alpha Linux, making our service distribution decisions MUCH easier as we no longer need a separate machine for Zephyr (thereby defeating most of the point of Zephyr).

R'lyeh -- "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn..."

HP 9000/375, NetBSD. Waiting to be out in front of a firewall. In a previous life, r'lyeh was once the secondary DNS server for GALT. (For a while it was the most stable machine we had) Waiting in the wings to assume responsibility for Kerberos.

Mu -- The OTHER lost continent

HP 9000/375, NetBSD. R'lyeh's twin. Waiting for a chance to become a primary DNS server. This might mean separating them, which would be traumatic, since they've been together for the past 10 years.

Atlantis -- The Lost Continent

PowerBook Duo, NetBSD. Quit laughing, it's actually quite stable. Currently our playground for Zephyr.

Peos -- Built by the survivors of Atlantis

Mac IIcx, NetBSD. Currently running a hacked together version of Kerberos IV (that's not as pleonastic as it first sounds.) Also a gateway for Atlantis.

Brigadoon -- Scottish city that appears for one night every 10 centuries

Sparc IPX, Solaris. Collecting dust in an Intuit warehouse one stall over from the Ark of the Covenant, pending my wading through all the red tape to change its ownership.

Pompeii -- City destroyed by the erruption of Mt. Vesuvius

Sparc IPC, Solaris. Awating a monitor cable and set up in Ohio.

Herculaneum -- City destroyed by the erruption of Mt. Vesuvius

Sparc IPC, Solaris. Awating set up and a static net connection in CA.

The Tools of the Trade

Oh, here's some geeky stuff that we use and think is cool.

SSH

A drop-in replacement for rsh. Includes support for encryption, authentication (using dual-key encryption) and identity agents.

Kerberos

Authentication service for unfriendly networks. Far from perfect, but for a long time the only game in town.

Zephyr

A "Real-time" (usually close enough) "Notification Service." This is a large void into which vast amounts of time and energy seem to naturally fall. Do not try this at home.

NTP

Network Time Protocol. Made for anal-retentive people (or programs) who absolutely NEED to know the exact time down to a few milliseconds, as well as requiring everyone else to agree that they're right.

Apache

The price isn't the only reason it's the worlds most popular web server.

Zsh

The Psi-shell pre-alpha. All the best of bash, tcsh, ksh, and a whole lot more! File globbing on steroids, shell functions, named directories. All this and a floor wax too!

PGP

What is it about geeks that makes them sure that people might actually care what they're saying?