This page is being rewritten. You can see my setup page from early '98 here for a little retro fun (needs some links fixed).
Here's the overview
I have an Athlon 'Classic' (slot A) 750MHz in an Asus K7M in an Aopen HX08 full-tower case. It also has 256MB RAM, twin 9GB IBM Ultra-SCSI hard disks, DEC Tulip clone fast ethernet card, Seagate Travan drive (for backups). Yamaha CD-RW drive and finally a Leadtek Winfast (Nvidia) GeForce DDR AGP graphics card.
This is my main workstation. I do most of my software development (little home projects and some work related stuff too) on this machine as well as using it as an xterm to my server. I call this machine 'beer' which is perhaps the worst hostname I've ever come up with. Finally the machine serves as the backup server to the other linux machine on the network.
My server is a Dell Dimension XPS M200s which I found in a dumpster (hence it's hostname - dumpster) complete with all bits of the case, cpu and cache ram, and a 24X cd-rom drive. In this I put some Crucial memory, a Western Digital hard drive, and two 3COM Etherlink XL PCI network cards.
This machine is connected to my DSL modem directly and runs my internet facing services. Additionally via a second network card it connects to my hub and hence acts as a gateway to the other machines using IP masquerading :
Internet <-> Speakeasy <- DSL (1.4/384)-> dumpster
^
|
beer <--hub
| |
elvis <--| |
|
dinky <----
For work access from I use my Thinkpad 240X which is dual-boot Windows98 and Slackware Linux (something very near slack 8.0).
I use Slackware as much as possible. I've been using it since '96 and I like it's balance of simplicity, power and reliabilty.
To send email I run sendmail. Since I have to admin some Solaris machines in my "spare time" at work, I don't want to have to bother with another mta here at home.
To receive email I can get email directly to any user on my server as simply username@mihalis.net. That works when my server is up. Alternatively I have a pop3 account through my ISP and I use fetchmail to grab it from their. The nice thing is it then stuffs it through sendmail here anyway so it's something like SMTP delivery, except for a lag (I only run fetchmail every few minutes).
Here's my config (edited so I don't reveal my private email details) :
poll mail.speakeasy.org proto pop3
user ME there is LOCAL_ME here password MYPASSWORD
antispam 571 550 501 554 451
What does this do? It means get mail for ME from mail.speakeasy.org and deliver it to the user LOCAL_ME on this machine. The password is MYPASSWORD. Use POP3 protocol. If you get one of the listed codes from sendmail, bounce the mail as spam.
I invoke fetchmail as follows :
fetchmail -v -v -p pop3 -S localhost -d 1800
DSL from Speakeasy. My package is the "sysadmin /radsl/usr/pro" shown here. I get a measured 1300/302 kbps regularly using speakeasy's speedtest. Here's a typical graph on DSLReports.com - they rate my speed as between "awesome" and "insane".
They provide a bridged ethernet configuration using a Speedstream 5260 DSL adapter from Efficient Networks. I tried telnetting to this machine but it doesn't work, so no fun there. On the other hand it seems to "just work" more than the old I had from Bell Atlantic (Verizon) which was a Westell model.
To get good performance from my girlfriends Windows98 PC, I had to adjust some registry settings - see my DSL diary