The Apricot Systematic Computing System

hardware | visiting machines | policies | other elements

Apricot Systematic Computing System Hardware

Apricot Systematic, as a domain consists of several different machines. Naturally with them being unique machines, they run various operating systems.

The current setup includes:

ryoohki

A Sun SparcStation 10/30 with 192meg of core, an internal 424meg hard drive, and an internal 4gig drive. We also have Fujitsu 128meg MO drive and Apple CD300 CD ROM drive hanging on Ryoohki's scsi bus. The parallel port is being tied up by a LaserJet 4MP. We are still running SunOS4.1.3.

Ryoohki is Scanner's primary use machine. In the upcoming months Scanner will be building a Pentium 133 FreeBSD machine that will become his primary use machine and ryoohki will then become the remote login server for most of the other people who use the Apricot Systematic Computing System.

tenchi

A DEC PC XL60 (DEC Pentium based machine at 60mhz) with 32meg of core an internal 1gig scsi disk, and a Toshiba 4401 CD ROM drive. This is Carolyn's machine, and it is running NeXTSTEP 3.3. We have not yet applied patchlevel 1 to the OS yet. Need to do that soon.

azaka

A 486 DX2/66 with 16meg of core, an internal 1gig scsi disk and an external 2.1gig scsi disk, an HP 35480A DAT drive (gotta love those 8gig backups), and a Toshiba 3501A CD ROM drive. This machine is running FreeBSD. This is basically our server machine. It will be running the Apache httpd.

kamidake

A 486 BL75, with '387 fpu, 32 meg of core, an internal 700 and some odd meg scsi disk, an internal 2gig ide disk, and an external 2gig scsi disk. This machine is running FreeBSD and serve two main purposes. It is our guest machine, and it is the Apricot Systematic Computing System's news machine (nntp.apricot.com). By guest machine I mean that it sits out in public in the cinema room.

This machine also has an HP IIc color scanner attached to it. When washuu, the pentium 133 that will become our main use machine is built, the HP scanner will be moved to that machine.

sasami

A SparcStation IPX with 32meg of RAM, a 424meg internal scsi drive and a 600meg external scsi drive. This machine runs Solaris 2.5.

yuri

A Pipeline 50 ISDN Gateway from Ascend. This is the local side of our gateway to the world.

kei

A Pipeline 50 ISDN Gateway from Ascend. This is the remote side of our gateway to the world through our ISP, meer.net.

Naming Conventions

You may wonder where these names that have been chosen for most of the machines in the Apricot Systematic domain come from. It has been a sort of principle to name various machines after characters in various anime titles. The first machine, ryoohki was named after watching Tenchi Muyo. The machine had just transitioned from a Sun 3/50 to a Sun SparcStation 10. This was felt to be appropiate. When Carolyn got her DEC PC XL-560 she needed a name for it. After some thought and following the lead with ryoohki she called it tenchi. kamidake and azaka arrived at the same time. Both being 486 based machines, arriving at the same time, and following the tradition of using characters named from Tenchi Muyo we named them after the guardians. We are currently building another machine. An intel pentium based machine that will probably run FreeBSD. This machine we will probably name washuu, since this machine will become our priamry use machine as well as the machine we do our kernel tinkering on.

Visiting Machines in Our Domain

If you are browsing the apricot.com domain you may notice quite a few more hosts than what is listed above. We keep a number of IP addresses reserved for various friends so when they visit and bring over all their machines they will already have the DNS work done so that they can pretty much plug and go.

This list includes:

• ryuuoh.apricot.com, Jim Elliott's machine.

Policies

First off, Apricot Systematic supports Free Speech on the internet!

Policies?! We do not need no steenkin' policies!
Actually, since we run a quasi-production system here this means that we do have some sort of policies about what we are offering and how we expect our users to behave:

• The Apricot Systematic Computing System has daily backups. Every tenth backup we archive the tape for prosperity. In actuality every now and then a backup gets missed because no one is home to swap tapes in the tape drive. This, however, is rare. We do do individual restores.
• Although we believe strongly in free speech we do not approve of harrasing or abusive behaviour.
• Accounts on the Apricot Systematic Computing System are anonymous if people desire that.
• Even though the accounts may be anonymous, they are unique and identifiable. Everything you do on your account is under your responsibility and you will be held accountable.
• Accounts on the Apricot Systematic Computing System are given out to individuals. They are not meant to be shared.
• Using any resources of the Apricot Systematic Computing System to break in to other systems is not tolerated.

Other Elements...

The Apricot Systematic Computing System is a rather amorphous entity. We have plans to do such things as hook up parts of our A/V system, wine cellar, coke fridge, and some of the furniture about the apartment up to this system.

As such things happen hopefully we will remember to update these pages accordingly.