The Armory Network

In September of '91, my housemates and I decided that it was time to connect our machines together via Ethernet (thinnet). This turned out to be harder than expected, due to various problems including a BNC tee adapter that after much hair-pulling was found to be missing its center conductor. The first machines linked were deepthought (running XENIX at that time) and ex-housemate Bela's machine r-pentomino. On Thanksgiving Day of 1993, our Internet connection went live via a 128Kbps ISDN connection. We now have a 1MBps SDSL connection.

The current machines are:

deepthought
The first multiuser machine at the Armory, initially running XENIX (a variant of UNIX). It is now a dual Xeon 3.6GHz PCIE machine with 2GB of memory, 1.7TB of disk space, and 34 serial ports. It is our open access machine, with all of the general dialup lines and most of the accounts (1500 or so) on it. deepthought is powered through an APC SmartUPS 2200 connected to an external 48V 60A-Hr battery pack. It is administrated by John (spcecdt).
aldebaran
Aldebaran is Mike's machine. It has a few accounts on it, and has its own DSL connection in addition to being on the Armory network.
earth
John's workstation
lex
A Lexmark OptraColor 45 inkjet printer.
hip
An HP PSC 2510 printer/scanner/etc., the main house printer.
X Terminals
I was given a bunch of Tektronix XP10 X terminals by a generous donor. Currently, two of them are on the net, one each in the upper and lower living rooms, replacing two of the Wyse 60 character terminals as login points.
luxo
The iMac that lives in the lower living room, mainly acting as a login point and media hub.
sirius
An OS/X Mac in the upper living room, acting as a scanner workstation and for general household use.
SDSL Router
Our SDSL router connects our house Ethernet to the rest of the Internet through a DSL.net-provisioned SDSL line that delivers packets to our IP provider, also DSL.net. The router is powered through a UPS so that the other UPS-powered equipment in the house does not loose Net connectivity during short power outages.
ports & ports2
Terminal servers. ports lives in the garage at the wiring nexus, and servers the lower living room and bathroom terminals. ports2 serves the upper living room loft and subloft terminals.
orange
Provides dialup PPP connectivity for an off-site user.
audrey
A 3com Audrey, slated to act as the lower living room music server.
squeeze
A SlimDevices Squeezebox that plays music in the garage (also connected to an FM radio transmitter so that I can listen while wearing workshop hearing protection).

This web page maintained by John DuBois