Popped down to Nottingham yesterday to pick up ‘waco’, our SPARCstation 20 I and the other wasters had colo’d so we could host domains, websites, email, etc. Having our own box on the ‘net has been a long standing tradition amongst us ex-uni waster types. First we had Grelb, which was actually several generations of machines, going from a 386 to a Pentium something-or-other (the specs didn’t really bother us too much at the time, as long as we had diskspace and access to it). Grelb was hosted under a desk at Glasgow Uni’s Students Representatives Council in the same room as their web/mail server (which we also maintained) and their water tank. However, the tiny window had a great view of University Avenue and the path up to the Library and the Reading Room, so it was a great place to chill sometimes, listening to streaming Virgin Radio — how l33t!

Next, was Grufl, which was a Pentium II something or other, I think. It was the first time we’d managed to sort out our own domain name – wasters.com. Grufl was hosted under a desk at what shall remain an unnamed ISP, since most of us weren’t at uni anymore. Eventually, with the occasional outage of several days (because our bandwidth usage was starting to get noticed, or the guy whose desk we were under was off for a few days on holiday), we started thinking “perhaps it’s time to spend some … money!”

So next came Waco, which is a SPARCstation 20, and was hosted at Host Europe‘s colo facility in Nottingham for about two and a half years, and was always on for most of those two years — I got dropped jaws when I told the guys there we’d had about 770 days uptime on the box.<darthvader> Impressive … </darthvader>

And now we have Obelisk, a custom-built 1U box with dual PIII 1GHz CPUs, 1 gig of RAM and 80 gig of ATA-133 RAID1 disk … and it’s in the Telehouse. So fast is going to be the operative word here. It’ll hopefully go live on Monday (last minute issues), and we’re all very much looking forward to it. <homersimpson> Mmmm, telehouse … </homersimpson>