about jammed.com

jammed.com is a motley collection of obsolete or otherwise rejected Unix machines that reside in the basement of an old house in the Hawthorne district of Portland, OR, at the other end of a 512kb DSL connection provided by Aracnet, a local, reliable and affordable ISP. In the old days (1994-1996), it was a UUCP node (unkadath.uucp), originally through the grace of MacMinix (!) running on a Mac Classic (!!), (later upgraded to the most krad Mac of all time, the Mac SE/30.. which I bought at a NAU auction for 7.7% of the cost of my Classic.. but anyway.). The UUCP feed was courtesy of Paul Balyoz-- at the time, a Unix sysadmin for Northern Arizona University's College of Computer Science & Engineering. From February 1996 to March 2000, jammed.com ran off of a 33.6 USR Courier modem with a PPP connection to the Internet via scruz.net.

jwa runs the site. The domain name was registered in 1995. The name "jammed" was a silly idea for a company name I had as a sixth-grader. Initially it was an abbreviation; "J.A.M.M.E.D. Systems, Inc." (I never came up with anything memorable for the abbreviation.)

This web server is named "tillamook" , named for a street in Portland (which is in turn named for the town of Tillamook, famous for its cheese.) It is is a 350mhz AMD K6 with 64mbs of RAM, running Debian GNU/Linux and the Apache http daemon. The last time I looked, the server pumps out about .582 requests/sec -- which works out to roughly ~50,000 hits per day. Most of that is hits to a side project of mine, newzbot. The banner ads on this site actually help offset the cost of my ISP & telco bills, amazing! Who said banner advertising was dead..

The firewall, "celephais" , is an old 486/66 named that I picked up at a garage sale in Mountain View in the summer of 1996. Until April 2000, it did double duty as a firewall and a web server. With only 16mbs and serving up to 500,000 hits per month, it was quite a busy little box. Now it's a dedicated 3-NIC firewall. I'll likely replace celephais with my desktop machine "nimue" when I eventually upgrade my desktop, but until then it will keep chunkin' away. celephais usually has 200+ day uptimes until the power supply fan starts making the "please lube me before I catch on fire" noise. celephais ran RedHat 4.2 from 1996 until I upgraded it to RedHat 6.2 in April 2000.

My internal mail, file, and database server is named "kadath" . kadath has been through some changes-- in 1993, it was a 486/33 w/ 8mbs of RAM. In 1997 I upgraded it to a 486/66 with 24mb of RAM, and in 1999 (around the time I discovered the joys of MySQL), it was upgraded to an AMD/350 with 64mb of RAM. It's still an AMD/350, but it now has 192mb of RAM and lots of SCSI and IDE disk -- necessary for databases, mp3 file collections, and all the Unix stuff that I've collected.

"moria" is a dusty old Sparc 10 acting as a nntpcache USENET server. You can use this server via the feature-free web-based newsreader on newzbot. moria runs Solaris 2.7.

(There are other machines, of course. These are just the ones that get the most use :)

Ultimately, jammed.com exists for two reasons: (a) to provide me with reliable Internet access & machines to hack around on, and (b) provide a platform for me to serve data via the web (or whatever comes next.) One of the coolest things about the web is how easy it is for anyone to publish information & create resources, as opposed to passively consuming content. Resist all efforts to turn the Internet into TV!

www.jammed.com main page.


$Date: 2003/12/31 05:46:55 $