Back when the homeland was kind of ridiculous.
imgur.com/a/Ro7erN8
imgur.comPosted Apr 14, 2019, 10:52 PM UTC
13532
imgur.comWait, when did homelab not become ridiculous? lol . Awesome picture and it's always great to see this stuff.
14
some of the pics I see in here now make me think "Good grief, mine was never that bad!" and then I go "Oh. yeah, it kinda was..."
still waiting for the dude in here (there's probably one..) with a rack of Sun E220Rs in his garage. :D
3
could not agree more!
2
Hotline Server.....Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time.
I remember using Hotline over analog modems (28.8k & 56k) looking for installation floppy disk images of various software. It dredges up memories of so much anguish due to random disconnections and arbitrary bans especially when you were so close to completing the download of the last floppy of the set you've been downloading for the last 12 hours. I can't image what it would have been like to have been able to use that on T1 speeds.
3
Hotline was awesome until they released the Windows version. When it was Mac only? omg. amazing.
and then the "click these 9 banner ads for the password" trash came out. :/
1
I think I do vaguely remember those kinda shenanigans on the tail end. If I'm thinking of the right thing, some of them kinda felt like they were designed like a "Where's Waldo" page of banner ads but instead of Waldo you were looking for the clickable link which _might_ be a button or might be some text hyperlink and maybe it might take you to another page or two before finding the link at the end of the journey. Like a leprechaun and it's pot of gold. That's an interesting angle though, I never really thought to correlate the release of the Windows version with the increase of that kind of monkey business.
1
yep. and if the password didn't work? oh well. they got their ad click, and you got nothing.
i remember a sharp rise in these tactics when the Windows version was released. It was a totally different marketshare. They never should have allowed the banner ad feature to begin with. sigh.
there are still some Hotline servers around too, though. :)
1
I wonder if beige will ever come back as a trend. I kinda like it.
3
the vintage mac community is thriving. :D
1
Right shelf top left looks like maybe a Dell tower? I had one that looked similar, 486 DX2.
2
Naw that looks like a big standard AOpen case
4
God those cases were sharp, we hated working on those because our hands we get sliced all the time.
5
Made of the highest quality chinesium
4
Slicing your fingers is nothing. I shocked myself on the power button of an opened up AT desktop case once upon a time.
3
Floor on the right, too, with the tape drive on it (memory might be fuzzy on that one - could just be generic junk from the same era)
2
Naw I think you are correct
1
Ah ok. I just remember the vents down the middle.
1
Not a dell case. :) I have a better pic of it somewhere, I’m not through sorting stuff out.
Found a CD from ages ago with a ton of pics on it. It’s been ... interesting.
1
Which one was running the Bolo server?
2
Holy RISC, batman! I will upvote any post here with non-Intel gear in it. Awesome!
Do you remember anything about that USR switch?
2
i was a huge AMD fan back in the day. and 3dfx. i also found pics of me in my 3dfx hat. and a Sun Microsystems hat.
my wardrobe was Silicon Valley data center monkey. lol I found a better pic of the switch. it was one of these and i'm surprised to see that it's selling for that much still. wow.
this guy has one too. it had a bunch of managed 10bt ports in it. i remember it being kinda loud too.
2
Holy crap, I had one of those switches at one time. I completely forgot about it until i saw this picture.
1
1.) LOVE IT MAN!!!!
2.) My homelab around 2k was not fair different (only had less servers)
3.) I cant find the pics, despite I know I took at least some. (Could have been vanished during any 2k raid meltdown)
2
keep looking. :D
2
LOVE the Apple poster.
1
one of my biggest regrets in life is not acquiring a LOT more old (and now collectable) Apple stuff when I had the chance. :(
and years ago, I had the perfect chance. (as in.. I was there when some of this stuff was being handed out) I was just an immature idiot that had no idea what was going on around me. Sigh.
That's one of the reasons that I'm having a blast in the vintage Mac world. It brings back a lot of other good memories of a time long ago. The Mac world has been a fun place for many years.
1
This was way way back in 2001-2002-ish?
Clockwise from top:
US Robotics switch
Netgear switch
Foundry ServerIron XL (got it cheap, hardware damage)
Some PC, I think it was an Athlon XP running Linux
Sun Sparcstation IPC x 2
Power Macintosh 6100/66 x 2, both running QuickDNS (old, doesn't exist anymore)
Sun Sparcstation 5 x 2 - one had DNS, another had Checkpoint FW-1
Power Macintosh G3/266 x 2 (1 running OS X Server, the other Mac OS 9.something with AppleShare IP and good old Hotline Server)
Some other PC that I think had SuSE Linux, was for inbound mail filtering only.
A friend's linux box
Another Red Hat box running Apache and hosting a few websites
A Gentoo Linux box mirroring some NNTP stuff from somewhere
3 more generic ass linux boxes and I have no idea what the heck they were doing. i think the last one was attached to that tape backup unit.
I still have the orange iBook poster, but everything else is long gone.
This was all on a sole T1 too.
All of this crap ended up helping me to stay afloat and employed even during the tail end of the dot-com crash. The experience with the homelab really did help me with real world job skills, and it ended up being a fun topic during interviews.
Woah, a T1 line. IIRC, back in 2003-ish I'm still on 256kbps DSL...
I think it was basically a vdsl2 line sold as a t1, which iirc was more and more common back then. It was flaky as shit and the isp was run by complete jerks. Lol
Eventually I moved to a 2.2mbit dsl line from XO and that was amazing at the time :D
Not entirely "sold as", T1s are encoded over (S)HDSL. Raw T1s are comparatively annoying to work with from an outside plant perspective, plus distance is quite limited. Using HDSL requires line-powered repeaters and a box at either end to convert, but it's much more practical and cooperates with other DSLs in the same cable bundle. If you had a box like from ADC or Pairgain you plugged into, that's what that did!
(I work for a telco. Can confirm, am complete jerk. And yeah, they're STILL flaky. Not only are the lines as sensitive as regular DSL, but with the inline power, some problems that would merely impair the DSL portion itself result in a repeater going down.)
it's been years since i've touched any of that stuff. my memory is fuzzy. currently i'm sitting here drooling at AT&T Fiber coming to my neighborhood.
i remember getting 15/15 FIOS in 2007 and thinking it was the most amazing thing on the planet. now in 2019 i'll be getting 1000/1000. :D
Can confirm.
Used to connect T1 Pairgains together using steel commo wire through woods, rivers, ponds, etc. over distances of 2 miles overseas and they were always shaky and very prone to blowing up if they weren't connected to a line conditioner/surge suppressor.
I hated Pairgain modems. And steel wire.
[deleted]