A chronicle of most of the OCF's production workstations and severs, and a few others, from the fall of 1999 to the present (fall 2003 as of this writing), illustrated by the icons that represented them in the ruptime web interface. "I" means Stephen 'smcc' McCamant.
In the beginning, all the OCF's machines were Apollo workstations. However, the Apollo platform didn't have much of a future (Apollo was purchased by HP soon after the donation), and the OCF decided to switch to another Unix platform. After considering the price/performance of machines available at the time, the OCF decided to go with Sun (over, for instance, *BSD on 386s).
The lab on the 2nd floor of Eshleman hall, in its heyday, was populated by a large number of MIPS-based DECstations. By the time I arrived, however, these had been relegated to the status of X terminals, and they weren't particularly good ones. When the ASUC tried to reclaim most of the room the DECstations went into storage, never to come back out.
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| tsunami | |
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| whirlwind | |
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HP "Envizex p" X terminals. From these, you could connect to either login servers in Barrows, or the Ultra5s. Because the X protocol sent all keystrokes, including passwords, in the clear, staffers were advised not to use these for account approval.
The "no users" icon shows the CDE XDMCP host chooser; note that whirlwind's monitor had a blue tinge, which could not be fixed by adjustment. The logged-in icon shows the default CDE login session.
| sandstorm |  |
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| hailstorm |  |
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| firestorm |  |
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sandstorm was a "pizza box" SPARCstation 2 and hailstorm a "lunch box" SPARCstation IPX, and these were the better machines. Firestorm was a SPARCstation IPC; we also had SPARCstation 1s, but with only one wall's worth of space left in Eshleman, only sandstorm and hailstorm were regularly in service.
hailstorm was a particular favorite of mine; for that reason, its logged-in icon shows my Fvwm desktop.
| pestilence |  |
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I believe more of the OCF's servers were originally sun4c machines, but by the time I arrived the only one left was pestilence, a SPARC 2, as the backup mail server. Luckily, this was not a performance-critical job.
pestilence was headless and no-one ever logged into it, so rather than any screen contents, the "down" icon just shows its backside.
| apocalypse |  |
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| death |  |
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| war |  |
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| millennium |  |
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apocalypse was a clone of a SPARCstation 20, an Integrix SWS 20, and had two processor modules. It served both as a login server and as our DNS nameserver.
war and death were headless versions of SPARCstation 10s; their cases said "SPARCserver". Since we had a number of sun4m processor cards kicking around, both eventually got to be dual-processor, though none of the processors got into three digits of megahertz.
death was the web server; its icon attempts to reproduce Apache's feather icon. One of my earlier admin projects (with Devin 'jones' Jones) was installing version 1.3.9, with support for SSL.
war was the mail server, the master NIS+ server, and the syslog host. The beige thing on top of it is a DEC VT100 terminal, which served as its console. The yellow post-it note, attached with black electrical tape, advised staffers that if they accidentally hit "break" (the serial-terminal equivalent of Stop-A, dropping the machine into the PROM firmware monitor) they should immediately give the command "go" to bring the machine back to life. The VT100 eventually had to be discarded when its phosphors became so dim to read with the lights on. We tried to replace it, but we went through two different terminals whose keyboards didn't contain the keys necessary to configure them: a library cast-off WYSE with a "peon" keyboard, and an AT&T terminal whose keyboard had been replaced with a regular PC AT one, and had to be returned to CalLUG.
After apocalypse was replaced by an Ultra 1, the machine was reincarnated for a while as "millennium" on one of the free IP addresses in Barrows, and used for various testing purposes. The logged-in icon shows the CDE desktop as configured by Akop 'akopps' Pogosian.
| famine (mark 1) |  |
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| famine (mark 2) |  |
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| conquest |  |
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| apocalypse |  |
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| pestilence |  |
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| supernova |  |
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The older famine was a Integrix clone of an Ultra 1, running at 143 MHz, and was a login server, held the /opt/local disks, and was one of the two workstations in server room. After being retired from this role, it was used for a while as the Heller lounge replica /opt/local server, since its internal SCSI connectors were 50-pin, unlike the SCA connectors of a genuine Sun.
Once we had more Ultra 1s, the old famine was replaced by a genuine Sun running at 167MHz; by this point, /opt/local service had moved to war, which also took famine's place on the Barrows Hall desk as a workstation, with famine being relegated to a shelf.
conquest has had a very long run, having been bought as a login server and continue to play that role up through the present. In the earlier days, it also had the disks for /home, before they moved to death. It was the workstation on the right-hand side of the desk in Barrows. At the same time that famine and apocalypse were replaced, conquest got a CPU and motherboard upgrade and went from 143MHz to 167MHz, but it remained externally the same.
apocalypse has a monitor connected and was usable for login in 72 Barrows, but for lack of desk space, the CPU and its monitor were on two shelves; you had to keep the keyboard on your lap, and the mousepad on top of another machine. For no particular reason, the pizza box was on a higher shelf than the monitor, which is why the icon is arranged as it is.
The logged-in screens for the login servers is intended to represent "pine", which has generally been the most popular program running on them. This is somewhat symbolic, though, since it wouldn't have shown up on the monitor like this: even if you had tried to run it with the machine's limited console text mode, it would have been black on white rather than white on black as shown.
pestilence was also later replaced by an Ultra 1; it also took the DNS server role from apocalypse.
supernova was set up in the Heller Lounge server room as a local mirror of /opt/local, to improve performance when the network connect to Barrows was slow. It also was picked as the Samba server, because of its Heller location closer to the Windows boxes it served.
| firestorm |  |
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| sandstorm |  |
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| hailstorm |  |
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| blizzard |  |
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| earthquake |  |
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| volcano |  |
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| tsunami |  |
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| flood |  |
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| monsoon |  |
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| tempest | |
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| cataclysm |  |
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| maelstrom |  |
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| whirlwind |  |
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| tornado |  |
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| cyclone |  |
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| hurricane |  |
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| typhoon |  |
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The Unix side (really, the perimeter) of the Heller Lounge was inaugurated with a large donation of Ultra 1 workstations handed down from the CS department's Network of Workstations (NOW) research project. Initially, these seemed like a major step up from the old Suns we'd had in Eshleman, but they didn't compare favorably to the Gateway PCs, either in terms of processing power (167MHz UltraSPARCs vs. gigahertz AMD Athlons) or graphics (8-bit CG6es vs. NVidia GeForce 3D-accelerated cards). Except for some early problems with their CPU fans, they performed reliably. To make the best use of limited desk space, they were arranged on the desks turned 90 degrees from their natural orientation, since otherwise there wouldn't have been space between machines to insert floppies or CDs, or enough front-to-back space for cables sticking out the back and a keyboard in front.
As shown in the icons, some of the Ultras had CD drives, some didn't, and one had a broken CD drive, marked with a white paper sign.
There was some disagreement about how to arrange the Suns (17 Ultra1s and 3 Ultra 5s) in the new lab. Luns 'tee' Tee suggested alphabetical order, and Akop numerical order by IP address, but I came up with the thematic arrangement shown above, and made it stick by going around and making labels for all the machines before they were jumpstarted. (Note that avalanche, fallingrocks, and mudslide appeared, in that order, between blizzard and earthquake).
| blizzard |  |
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| millennium |  |
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I spent a fair amount of time, on an on-again off-again basis, trying to install Linux on OCF machines and integrate them into the Sun setup. The high point of these efforts was a hand-me-down Digital Pentium 100 that served for a while as a fileserver for a Linux /opt/local and an rwhod++ server for the little-endian Linux boxes. (It had been sitting next to the TDA when we were bringing it from Soda to the OCF, so we considered it part of the donation; if it wasn't originally meant to be, no one seemed to miss it.) Because it supported rwhod, it could go in the ruptime display, but I never made an icon for it. The icon shown here was created by Eugene 'eek' Kim, but I'm not sure what meaning it was supposed to have. blizzard was the original name for this machine; after the move to Heller, than name was taken by an Ultra 1, and it became 'drought'. After the P100 drought's disk died, a Pentium Pro machine from the TDA was set up by Bem 'ajani' Jones-Bey as a DHCP server for people who plugged laptops in in the lab, also as drought.
In the fall of 2003, the increasing influx of spam and corresponding processing load caused by spam filtering were causing our Blade 100 mail server, war, to bog down. This was the perfect excuse to press a left-over from the recent purchase of Dell workstations as a dedicated SpamAssassin server. Christened "millennium" and currently running Gentoo Linux, it may see other services moved to it in the future.
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| fallingrocks |  |
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| mudslide |  |
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With their blazing 270MHz processors, the Ultra 5s were the most desirable machines in the Eshleman lab. (Sun considered them relatively low-end, basing them largely on commodity PC hardware, but they were the only machines in that lab that were new at the time). Though not visible in this icon, mudslide for a time had a Plextor CD burner. In the Heller lab, they became the most desirable Sun workstations; the cluster of them on the south wall was the most popular place for staff members to sit. fallingrocks was also drafted into service as a Samba server to support printing from the Windows Gateways. The Ultra 5s lost their spot as the most-desirable Sun workstations with the arrival of the Blade 100s, though mudslide got an upgrade to its graphics card, handed down from Sun's E250 donation. They're now being retired from the lab, though fallingrocks is holding on until its print service gets moved somewhere else.
| firestorm |  |
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| sandstorm |  |
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| hailstorm |  |
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| blizzard |  |
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| flood |  |
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| monsoon |  |
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| whirlwind |  |
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| tornado |  |
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| hurricane |  |
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Blade 100s were the next generation of workstations produced by Sun to be as cheap as practical by using PC parts (such as IDE hard drives). Thanks to a '3 for the price of 2' educational discount, we were able to get 10 for 600 some dollars each; one was appropriated as a new server, and the others went into the lab as workstations. The Blades were a quite noticeable improvement over Ultra 1s, but a bit disappointing compared to contemporary PCs; they at least had 24 bit graphics, but no 3D acceleration, and their processors were 500MHz with a skimpy cache. Because it could use a large, cheap, IDE hard disk, firestorm traded its CD drive to mudslide in return for the CD burner, though this disrupted the color schemes.
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| war |  |
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Our requests for a hardware donation from Sun paid off handsomely in the form of a fully-loaded Enterprise 250 server, with two processors, 2GB of RAM, and six internal 36GB disks. It would have taken a good part of a year's budget for us to purchase one of these, and even accounting for Sun's price inflation, it was an impressive machine. Clearly it was going to become the centerpiece of our Sun servers, but there was some disagreement about exactly how. I argued for it to be a login server, while Akop thought it should be just on the back-end. In what was a bit of an awkward compromise, it ended up being mainly a back-end server: users are allowed to log into it, but we've never advertised it, so only staff members and other in the know take advantage of it. Its internal disks hold users' web pages (/services), while an external RAID array holds /home; because it runs the web server, it got the name death (after briefly being armageddon while in testing). It came with a pretty good graphics card, but this would have been wasted on a server, so that went to mudslide.
To keep our servers from being ridiculously unbalanced, we also snagged one of the Blade 100s to be a server. Keeping with Akop's preference for moving back-end services off the login servers, it got /opt/local as well the mail service; it got the name of the old mail server, war. Since it had fairly nice on-board graphics, it took famine's place on the desk in Barrows, though this was inconvenient for some staff members, who weren't allowed to log in to it.
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| biohazard |  |
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| blight |  |
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| epidemic |  |
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| jaws |  |
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| locusts |  |
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| madcow |  |
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| outbreak |  |
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| plague |  |
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| pox |  |
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With some help from ASUC Auxiliary head honcho Tom Cordi, we got a donation of PCs from Gateway at the same time they were providing machines, via a company named CampusLink, for kiosks in the MLK lobby. We pretty much asked for top of their line machines, though we declined speakers, as the lab was going to be adjoining a library, and for some reason I don't recall also didn't get Zip drives (though I remember discussing the issue with Ken 'kenao' Ott). With their flat-panel displays, these machines were instantly the most attractive in the lab, even though the software on them was uneven, at best, for a long time. With their accelerated 3D graphics, they were immediately recognized as gaming machines by those who were into such things. Though this crowd brought us some staff members, and favor with some people influential with the ASUC, there were conflicts between gaming, particularly Counter Strike, and more academic uses; eventually, we managed to put our foot down.
Since the Gateways were our first PCs, we decided to inaugurate a new, unified naming scheme: the Board of Directors first settled on "biological disasters", then selected ten names in that category, from a large field of suggestions, with an eye towards such features as ease of typing; they were then arranged in alphabetical order. (Given the Gateway logo, there was some thought to coming up with 10 cow-related disasters, but either his field was just too narrow, or we were insufficiently creative). The choice of "anthrax" would have been considered in bad taste had we chosen it after the well publicized attacks in the fall of 2001, but we made the choice before then, and I don't remember getting many complaints about it in their aftermath.
The icons for locusts and plague reflect the fact that for a while, both were dual-boot machines that also ran Linux; I'd been experimenting on locusts, and Stephen 'calman' Callahan was responsible for plague. There was a brief period when these machines were sometimes seen this way in the ruptime display, but it was hard to maintain the Linux sides when they were often not network accessible, and no significant user community became attached to them, in part because they didn't know they were there.
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| earthquake |  |
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| tsunami |  |
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| typhoon |  |
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| tempest |  |
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| cataclysm |  |
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The OCF recently purchased a number of PCs from Dell, to replace the last of the Ultra 1s in the lab. There had been and continues to be some discussion of them running Linux, but for the moment the lab workstations are just running Windows. (But see millennium, a Linux server, above). Since these arrived after I left, their appearance is somewhat based on guesswork.
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There have been OCF staff members interested in playing with Macintoshes since my earliest days in the organization, though no large group of them has ever made in into our regular workstation set. With the advent of Max OS X, Macs seemed like a good compromise for machines that would be acceptable both to our user base (supporting well-known applications like Word) and our staffers (because the Unix-based infrastructure with make remote administration and integration with our Sun servers possible). This goal still seems unrealized, though there is at least one iMac gracing our desks at the moment.