photo gallery is provided by gallery
blogging is provided by WordPress and Planet
email services are provided by Postfix
mailing list services are provided by GNU Mailman
web services are provided by the Apache web server.
photo gallery is provided by gallery
blogging is provided by WordPress and Planet
email services are provided by Postfix
mailing list services are provided by GNU Mailman
web services are provided by the Apache web server.
a little history
grommit was born my freshman year of college, at Beagle Hall in Revelle College, UCSD. it was born out of my first eBay buying spree where i
inadvertedly won 3 different auctions for Cyrix-200MHz CPUs. aaron, one of my suitemates at the time
took one, i took the other, and i re-ebayed the third (at a slight loss).
and thus was born the first 'grommit' server. aaron gave his chip to his
uncle and used his old computer to become 'bandicoot' (aaron's first server).
grommit.com went live with grommit.grommit.com serving off a 4.3GB Quantum
hard drive, housed in a solid industrial AT case powered by that
Cyrix-200MHz. this held good and true until somewhere in the middle to the end of my sophomore year.
during a rush of finals, etc. i absentmindedly let grommit.com expire.
a hawker snapped it up and held it for ransom wanting $500 for it. i
decided it wasn't worth it, and let it go - acquiring 'whacked.net' as a
consolation. during the next two years i often checked grommit.com,
waiting patiently.
i interned during my summers at Ricoh Silicon Valley; in the summer of
2001, they held an auction of surplus equipment for employees. i bought an
older used development eCabinet machine for around $150 - it was a Celeron
400MHz with a 9 or 10GB drive. i intended mainly to gut it for its LCD
display to use as some sort of car mp3 player. i used the rest as a local
file server, and dubbed it 'green' in my tradition of naming all my
computers after teas (joining ceylon, pekoe, and earlgrey).
on november 16th, 2001 - grommit.com expired, and i snapped it up on
november 17th. for the next two months, i worked on green, on and off, and
finally decided to go live with the new 'grommit.com' domain on january
15th of 2002.
green.grommit.com served faithfully and (more or less) stably off its old Celeron
400 MHz, with various RAM upgrades (64 to 128 to 256 to 768 and then back
to 256 after a 512 meg chip blew), and various hard drive upgrades (10GB to
20GB, then an addition of a 30GB, then a 60GB, and lastly an 80GB). all
was well and good until i decided to leave san diego to move up to the
bay area.
hosting from home out was out, as DSL has crappy latency and uplink issues.
so co-location was the arrived at decision. since facilities prefer
rackmount machines, a new server was in order. and thus, 'grommit.grommit.com' was resurrected as a dual Pentium-3 866MHz system with 2GB of ECC ram housed in a black 2U rackmount chassis. for the first time ever, grommit.com was officially served by a fast dedicated server-class system, with a fast port for better bandwidth. this same server powered the whacked.net, greatgrin.com, and various grommit sub-domains including hosting geoffarnold.com & planetidentity.org.
after graduating from UCSD, i joined Sun Microsystems, Inc. as a Solaris kernel engineer. due to my exposure to Solaris, i really wanted to convert grommit to Solaris 10, but just couldn't find the time/resources to do it. eventually, a friend hooked me up with an older SunCobalt LX50 server. dual Pentium-III CPUs running at 1.4GHz, with 10,000 RPM scsi disks. as a wise (excited) man once told me on the Internet: w00t! the new grommit.com server, powered by Solaris, went live at Hurricane Electric on Thursday evening, August 25th, 2005.
late 2006, CCCP (the co-op we hosted through) went defunct, and on December 6th 2006, grommit was moved across the bay to host with Cernio at its cabinets in 200 Paul.
late-summer of 2007 brought more users, more storage demands, and increased usage of grommit. we were stretched for disk space, and grommit was near its CPU and memory loads. response time lagged, users became unhappy. users chipped in, and behold... a new server was born. a new Supermicro 5015MT+ system powered by a quad-core Intel Xeon was purchased and temporarily named animalfarm.grommit.com (get it? 4 heads good... 2 heads bad). on November 17, animalfarm.grommit.com went live at 200 Paul running in parallel with the old grommit LX50 while migration of users and data was underway.
where are they now?
grommit.grommit.com: the original: (1998 apr 28 - 1999
june?) was stripped for parts through the years until all that was
left was its industrial AT case which was taken away by the Los Altos
Garbage Company in late June, 2003.
green.grommit.com: (2001 sept - 2003 july 18) was been retired, and resided in my dad's study for a few years.. slumbering away peacefully. stripped of the majority of its hard drives (moved to grommit: tng),
it dreamt of its heydey when it ruled the grommit.com domain. in mid 2004 it was finally gutted of any remaining useful parts, and then recycled by an e-waste recycling company.
grommit.grommit.com: the next generation: (2003 july 19 -
2005 august 25) was housed for 2 years at Hurricane Electric having faithfully served the
grommit.com web pages, email, blogs, photo gallery, etc. for approximately 25 users. it was sold to a fellow CCCP coloer
grommit.grommit.com: solarified: (2005 august 25 -
2007 november 25) was housed at Hurricane Electric, and then 200 Paul where it faithfully served over 30 users. resource constraints forced it to be taken down for a new more powerful machine. it was taken away and re-homed and re-purposed as a OpenSolaris build server for Project Nightingale
grommit.grommit.com: quadrific: (2007 november 17 - present) is housed at 200 Paul continuing to serve the grommit.com users (currently, we host various websites, email, blogs, photos, etc. for over 30 users).