A Brief History of the Servers

Updated 2007.02.09


The current server, Stihl is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800. This is a dual-core Socket 939 machine with 1.5GB of DDR RAM, two 120GB WD IDE drives in software RAID1, a DVDRW and a Biostar 939 Motherboard with the Nvidia 6100 chipset. This server is running Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06.1LTS.

The original Stihl was a Compaq Pentium III 733Mhz PC with two 80GB WD drives in software RAID1 running Debian Sarge. It was brought to Queen's in 2004 when istop.com decided to go belly-up in Ottawa. For a while, the previous machine, Dunkel, was held hostage as Istop struggled to figure out how to liquidate. We did get it back after a spell.

Dunkel was the machine before Stihl. Hosted in Ottawa at istop.com, the machine ran Debian testing/unstable (clearly our younger undergrad days...) It was a dual-PIII 1GHz machine with SCSI drives. As I recall, Ryan and Nate cobbled it together in a hideous old metal IBM case. It was an eye-sore, but it served us well. Ry completely re-built the server to make use of the tricks he learned in his first post-graduation job. Virtual users, pdns, mysql-based mail etc. Very cool.

The first machine that I was in on was Draught. It was a dual-Pentium II 300MHz machine with about 16 sticks of RAM. (Must have been 8 or 16MB sticks.) It was running an even older version of Debian. I can't remember when or why we ultimately decided to retire it. I still have the motherboard, RAM and CPUs in a drawer for old-times sake.