The toybox originated as "the toy" or "the box", a nifty Ultra that I got after several months of driving everyone insane by talking about how I was going to get one very soon now. This needs to be differentiated from "my toy," a much smaller piece of equipment that stubbornly refuses to run UNIX, about which I also talked incessantly before I purchased, and use now with fair ubiquity.

The toybox is a place for us to have fun, to practice, and to do things that we don't do at work.

On March 12, 2007 a touch of disk sadness led to toybox being moved to a PC running FreeBSD.

Internet Services

• WWW Pages: (Is that what these are?) via the Apache web server.

• Mailing Lists: For our friends, using Majordomo.

• USENET News: Still in the rumor and speculation stage.

Technical Foo

• Network: We're located on a 128 Kbps ISDN Centrex link provided by meernet, owned and operated by a few of our neighbors.

• OS: We were running Solaris 2.5.1, and have added a fair amount of software enhancements. For instance, who could live without perl?
  Now running on FreeBSD, but perl will always be with us.

• Hardware: toybox was originally a Ultra 1 Model 140 with 32 MB of memory and 1 GB of disk space, upgraded to 128 (256?) MB of memory and 8 GB of disk. The disk space is not quite enough, especially if we want to have a news feed, so we are due to expand at some point. The memory has been enough for our purposes, but it's always nice to have more.

  It's now a PC with 2 GB of memory and 1/3 terabyte of disk. Probably too late for a news feed, though.

The performance has on the whole been very speedy, and will probably be so for a while as we scale up.

The Toybox / Flick / © 1997 The Other Gretchen / Credits: Pixelsight
Last modified: March 15, 2007 (before that June 27, 1997, check back in a decade for the next update) / webmaster@flick.com