 Fun fact: this was DynDNS' first "real" datacenter (meaning: not my bedroom attached to a modem). It was in a basement of an office building on one of Ithaca's hills, with a small local wireless ISP that also did small colo. #DynDNSHistory (Don't miss the alt text for details of what you're seeing!) 33 comments
@tim @paul_ipv6  @tim That wiring is actually not that bad, all things considered ๐ @tim I used dyndns once when I was like 14 and running a zdaemon server over my parent's DSL connection on a Pentium II I found in the garbage :) @mgerdts lol I had completely forgotten those were Netras but you're exactly correct. The bottom two were "eBay specials" as we liked to call them. I think the Netras we actually bought new and might have been our first bought-new server-grade hardware. I can't honestly remember why we went with the Netras since we were primarily a FreeBSD shop. I vaguely recall being pissed off at Solaris all the time.  @drscriptt the EXIF says Dec 2001, that seems plausible, might have been towards the end of our time there IIRC. @drscriptt having looked at another source I'm not actually sure where that Dec 2001 timestamp is from. It still seems plausible but I'm not at all 100% confident of it. Sometime in the late 90s or early 00s for sure though.   @tim Iโm sad I never got a video of the blinking lights on the towers of full height 5 1/4โ HDDs in the darkened server room in the 90โs. Those 2 GB drives could be a pretty as a Christmas tree when they were in moderate use. @tim as a data center tech this makes me unreasonably happy to see (while also being slightly painful, but I've definitely seen worse colo racks as of recently -- stacked on a shelf AND with a nest of cables ๐)  @BalooUriza thank you for your past support! I am sad I don't have my old email to have all the records to go through on that and reminisce in that way!  @tim The rear of 3 Sun Netra X1's! This post should be behind a content warning for being too sexy!  @tim thatโs some very cool history. Have you written in detail somewhere about how it all came about and the adventures you had along the way? Because thatโs the kind of book I love to read. @carbontwelve I think the audience would be pretty small and honestly I'm not sure I'd be able to make it interesting enough to hold people's attention. But I'm definitely testing the waters in miniature here with #DynDNSHistory !  @tim Am I seeing Sun Sparcstation Ultra 1 and 5 model workstations at the bottom of that stack? I fondly remember my days doing Solaris administration with those types of systems. @it yup, something of that type, folks have guessed several specific models and your/their guesses are as good as my memory at this point. |
Gregory's Server
@tim
dyndns was a special place.