Technical: Sinister has twelve computers on an Ethernet network. Most of these are running Linux. Just one, dark, a.k.a. shell, is available for outside users at the current time. Dark is an old Pentium-90 system with a generic motherboard, an NCR SCSI card and two Seagate SCSI hard drives of 2.1GB each. It has 64 MB of ram. Dark is the web server, mail server, and most other functions of the network. Sinister has a single, 33.6K bps modem for administrative and occasional user use.
There is an Ethernet connection from the ground floor where sinister is located to the fourth floor where Ennui.Net is. Ennui has a similar Ethernet, with servers and workstations, and has the router and CSU/DSU for the T1 connection to OEM.NET, our Internet service provider.
History: In the Summer of 1995, Dr. Who installed a T1 Internet connection for his workplace. Finally, he had found a place to become a DNS server for his domain name. But what would that domain name be? After weeks of thought and perusal of the Internic database, he chose sinister.com. This was just before Internic made the decision to charge for DNS registration, so he did not have to pay a fee for a while, when it became time to renew. He attached a crappy Hayes 28.8K V.FC modem salvaged from work to his newly assembled Pentium-90 computer with 32 MB of ram and a 1 GB hard drive, running the Slackware 2.2 distribution of Linux. Sinister initially used the dialup modem pool at Dr. Who's workplace, but the connections were found to be unstable and slow. In addition, the modem had to share the a phone line with five other people in the house, so it was really only good for email, which was cached on Dr. Who's workplace.
When a new domicile was obtained in November of 1995, with Lady Velkor, Iskra, and Niobium, a phone line just for the modem was installed, and a room was dedicated for computers. Connections to Dr. Who's workplace continued to be flaky, so a dialup account from TIAC with a static IP address took its place. Sinister's reliability improved dramatically, and was on-line enough to make running a web server and general shell machine practical. The replacement of the V.FC modem with a better USR V.34 modem, contributed by Iskra further improved reliability. Sinister was connected to the net an average of 23.5 hours per day. Because TIAC only provided sinister with one IP address, a novel method of sharing that one IP address called IP MASQUERADING was used, and the entire sinister LAN was able to use the net at the same time.
TO BE CONTINUED....