cie.saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com

My wife and I are thinking of moving back downtown soon, so that means housecleaning in preparation. I've been biting the bullet and putting together an email to the local LUG mailing list offering up 7 (!) computers in various states. There's a lot of things started that never got finished.

Cie (named after Cie Baxter, of course) was my first server. It's got a 200MHz Pentium, 48MB of RAM and a 2GB IDE drive. Friends of mine had upgraded, and they asked me if I wanted their old computer. Hey, who's gonna turn down a free computer?

My first computer job was at a small ISP. I quickly wrangled a static IP (still allocated!) from the sysadmin and snaked an ethernet cable over the ceiling tiles from my desk to the server room. It was meant to be an IPv6 tunnel broker, but that quickly fell by the wayside; I got the basic routing sorted out, but then I lost interest when it came time to figure out an authentication scheme. I'm like that: lots of ideas, little follow-through. I've been lucky to stay interested in computers as long as I have.

What it did become was the web, mail and DNS server for my domain, my wife's, and a few friends of mine (though that last one I'm only doing DNS and secondary MX). It ran Slackware 7.0, straight from the CD set I bought at Chapters back when they still had books (and Linux CDs, apparently).

I remember convincing the sysadmin at work that I could handle securing BIND 9 (quietly convinced the entire time I was going to get r00ted within a week), and telling the owner of the company (who is even more flighty than I am) that an IPv6 tunnel broker would provide lots of value to our customers, and amazing the friends who had donated it in the first place that an old computer that would barely run Windows 98 could be of any use to anyone.

Incidentally, I was always a bit amused by the fact that I had an AOpen sticker on my server; I learned to loathe AOpen modems while at Dowco, and I swore I'd never buy anything with their name on it. But hey, since Cie was free, I guess it doesn't count...

I left Dowco but kept Cie, and it sat here by my desk at home, using up my ridiculously expensive static IP address for a long time. It was fine. And then, a while back, I tried to set up a pretty heavy PHP-based CMS for a friend of mine. Cie choked, right away: it took 20 seconds to render a page. That was no good at all.

I asked around, and the consensus was it was the RAM, idiot. That and the noisy PS fan convinced me it was time to upgrade.

My boss was selling his old computer -- a Compaq desktop machine with a 500MHz P3, 64MB of RAM and a SCSI tape drive. I bought a big-ass hard drive (and made sure it was going to be quiet -- best investment ever), put the tape drive in my fileserver, bought a 256MB stick of RAM and sat down to build a new server. I went with Slackware 9, spent some time locking down my firewall and /etc/fstab, got the latest kernel and OpenSSH sources, and installed, compiled, swore, reinstalled, formatted, and reinstalled again. Thus was born Thornhill (named after Lisa Thornhill, of course).

It's only fitting that I always meant to use Cie as a honeypot, but never got around to it.