[02] WHAT ARE SDF'S ORIGINS AND HISTORY? (LONG SUMMARY)
(For related information on SDF and the history behind this public
access UNIX system, read "The HACKER CRACKDOWN" by Bruce Sterling)
1987 - SDF was originally an APPLE ][e microcomputer running
"Magic City Micro-BBS" customized by Ted Uhlemann (iczer). The
system was run as a Japanese Anime SIG and was known as the SDF-1.
The SDF-1 at that time was just your typical BBS: One phone line
plugged into a 1200bps modem, 128 kilo-nibbles of core and two flexible
disk drives with 280 kilo-nibbles storage capacity each.
Stephen Jones (smj) helped locate a 5 megabyte mass storage unit for
the micro. Ted was only able to get about 3 megabytes out of the disk.
By adding a 2400bps modem and this new mass storage unit, SDF's users
noticed a substantial performance increase.
In 1989 Ted and Stephen began running SDF as a CITADEL BBS. It was
the filesystem like structure of the Bulletin Board that piqued their
interest. Both the Apple ][e and the IBM PC XT served logins.
Ted, Stephen and Daniel Finster (df) had been dialing into a system
run by an AT&T employee named Charlie Boykin. Charlie's system
was called The UNIX Connection (AKA attctc or killer.dallas.tx.us).
Charlie's public access UNIX was such a breath of fresh air compared
to restrictive BBS menus that when killer was abruptly shutdown (20-Feb-90)
during Operation SunDevil, it was greatly missed. At that point the three
decided they would form a replacement for killer.
16-Jun-91 - SDF.ORG
At this time UNIX had been runable on i386 machines for a couple of
years. Ted took on the responsbility of setting up the machine and
contacting UUCP network administrators around town to get UUCP mail
going. After trying to use an inexpensive UNIX clone (COHERENT)
which turned out to be a CROCK, Ted decided to go with Kodak's
Interactive release of UNIX SYSTEM 5 r3.2 1.0. The caseless
computer ran laid across Ted's desk.
01-Aug-91 - SDF.ORG
Interest in the public access UNIX system began to grow and it was
decided that the system be moved to another location so that more
phone lines (4) could be installed. Richard Losey (rlosey) contributed
to the project so that an AST four port board could be purchased to
support the 4 - 2400 dialups. There was also a sidewalk sale booth
which was mostly comprised of donated goods and half of Aaron Schmiedel's
(aaron) garage. From that point, SDF grew.
Summer-92
Ted and Daniel talked with David Lippke, a network manager at the
Unversity of Texas at Dallas (UTD), about an ARPANET connection for
the SDF. By then SDF had been running as a UNIX system for about a
year. The idea was considered by David, but eventually turned into
a proposed commercial venture. By the Fall of 1992 Ted, Daniel and
three SDF users Steven Parker (sp), Steve Linebarger (srl) and
Bill Middleton (wjm) had left SDF to form Texas Metronet, Dallas'
first (if not in Texas) commercial internet service provider. Stephen
remained behind continuing to administer to the SDF.
04-Aug-93
With the help of Charlie Boykin(SMU) and Rich Andrews(SMU), Stephen
was able to replace the INTEL based PC UNIX with a hardworking and
reliable WE32100 based minicomputer designed by AT&T (the 3B2). Brian
Rogers (brogers) helped Stephen install 9 - 14.4kbps telephone lines.
At this time, SDF's configuration was as follows:
uname Machine Description
------------------------------------------------------------------
sdf 3b2/400 4 Megs Memory, 2(72) Meg disk
sdf1 3b2/400 4 Megs Memory, 2(72) Meg disk SCSI HA 338 Meg disk
sdf2 3b2/310 4 Megs Memory, 1(72) Meg disk
sdf handled dialup access, sdf1 handled UUCP and sdf2 handled USENET
news processing. The machine used RFS (Remote File Sharing) over a
STARLAN network to share data.
Spring-94
4 3B2/400 machines were purchased from South Carolina State University.
Two were put in immediate service along with the original 3B2/310 system.
The machines were networked over a 1 megabit local area network (STARLAN)
and shared resources to give the illusion of one machine. Also purchased
were several terminals and an AT&T UNIX PC 7300 called 'minmei'.
04-Aug-95
The system is made up of one AT&T 3b2/400 and one AT&T 3b2/310.
The 310 has a SCSI BUS and handles the majority of USENET processing.
The 310's SCSI BUS has an EMULEX ESDI to SCSI converter which gives
support to 4 ESDI drives and only takes up one SCSI ID. By using this,
the SCSI BUS could very easily support 24 hard drives. The 400 handles
all user sessions. When you dialup into SDF you are connected to
the 400. The 310 and the 400 are on a STARLAN network. STARLAN is a
local area network which can be 1mbit or 10mbit in speed. The two
machines share disks through the Remote File Sharing package. When
you read USENET news on the 400 (sdf) it is actually reading the
articles over the network from the 310 (news) machine.
03-Mar-96 ANONBBS
Ted and Stephen got together very late one night and decided to start a
short lived project they called 'ANONBBS'. ANONBBS was just as it sounds,
it ran on an i386sx25 toshiba laptop with 60mb of storage and 10mb of RAM
under Digital Research DOS 5.0 .. The entire BBS was written in TELIX SALT
with an extremely functional, but minimalistic interface that Ted and
Stephen literally hashed out over tacos and nachos at 3am in a Taco Cabana.
The asethetic proved extremely useful and the system became busy. Users
would type up messages on their machines and then upload them to the
'C:\BBOARD>' directory. Files were stored in 'C:\XFER>' .. some users
signed their handles on messages while others just remained anonymous.
It was an experiment to see what people would do in an environment where
they had completely anonyomity and control.
01-May-96 SDF
Lucent Technologies/AT&T Bell Laboratories donated a 3b2/500 with an
XM (disk) cabinet that replaced the older setup. Special thanks to
Michael Dolan (Lucent) and John Marinho (AT&T) for their help.
AT&T 3B2 SYSTEM CONFIGURATION: Memory size: 8 Megabytes
System Peripherals:
Device Name Subdevices Extended Subdevices
SBD
Floppy Disk
SCSI
(S.E. BUS ID0)
SD01 ID1
155 Megabyte Disk ID0
ST01 ID2
Tape ID0
SD01 ID5
155 Megabyte Disk ID0
155 Megabyte Disk ID1
155 Megabyte Disk ID2
NI
EPORTS
MAU
VCACHE
SBD System Board. This board contains the 3b2's main processor.
It is possible to have up to 3 processor boards in this machine.
SCSI Small Computer Systems Interface. This BUS allows the system to
support up to 24 storage devices.
NI Network Interface. This feature card is a 10base5 interface which
support ETHERNET protocol.
EPORTS Enhanced PORTS. This feature card supports 8 38400bps serial
connections.
MAU Mathematics Accelerator UNIT.
VCACHE This board aides the processor by CACHE'ing commonly used
3b2/32200 32100 processor instructions.
30-Mar-97
Aaron Schmiedel (aaron) donated several large disk drives and a
higher capacity tape backup system. The system was reconfigured
to take advantage of the new storage resources.
24-Nov-97
Vincent Helliwell (thecave) donated a 2.1 gig SCSI drive which was used
to replace the old /udd (user directory directory) filesystem and allow
the last remaining 5.25" full height drive to be decommissioned.
15-Dec-97
A new server built almost entirely out of user donated parts was configured
and installed. The initial plan was for it to run NetBSD (and it just
may someday) but for the interim it runs a highly modified GNU system
with a slightly modified Linux kernel. Donated hardware that makes up
a portion of this machine:
P166+ CPU and 16megs RAM (aaron)
1.0 gig HD (cjc) (Traded for old SDF SCSI drives)
170 meg HD (iczer)
210 meg HD (wmills)
case w/ PS, motherboard, cabling, ethernet and video adapters (smj)
For the moment the machine spools news and serves NNTP connections to
both SDF hosted users and SLIP/PPP dialup users. It also batches news
up for UUCP hosts and for outbound local posts. X windows has been
installed on it along with CMU Common Lisp system for UNIX so that we
can begin porting tons of SDF specific programs to LISP.
24-May-99
The domain "freeshell.org" was registered as an alias for sdf.org
as a marketing strategy to help sdf grow. Since the "arpa" vote that
occured early in this year, SDF's amount sponsorship as grown. We are
hoping by making this general marketing step that sdf can continue to
grow and make a more obvious name for itself.
23-Aug-99
A secondary server 'sdf-2' is now acting as the main http server. It is
a PII/450MHz with 256mb of RAM and about 18 gigs of hard drive space.
it has a 13 gig file system which it sdf mounts so that shell users can
setup their homepages without having to login to the other machine.
01-Jan-00
System Configuration:
'sdf' P233, 94mb of RAM, 20gig mixed mass storage (EIDE/SCSI)
linux 2.0.37 kernel (modified), GNU software and 'linux' utilities
role: shell server, primary dns, secondary http server, mail server,
pop3 server, ftp server.
'sdf-2' PII/450MHz, 256mb of RAM, 18gigs mass storage (EIDE)
linux 2.2.14 kernel (modified), GNU software and 'linux' utilities
role: http server, secondary dns (others will migrate)
Network connectivity: DSL 1.4mb/768kb, 10mbit ethernet, 2b+d ISDN
11-May-00
'sdf' as a P233 has been decomissioned along with support hardware.
'sdf' AMD Athlon 750MHz, 384mb of RAM 36gig mixed mass storage (UDMA/SCSI)
linux 2.0.36 kernel (modified), GNU software and 'linux' utilities
same roles.
31-Oct-00
'sdf-2' now has two 30 gigabyte disks and has taken over as the primary
mail server for 'sdf.org'. It handles incoming and outgoing
SMTP/POP3 requests as well as primary webservice and minor functions.
'sdf-1' role is to primary that of a shell server. Mail can be sent
outgoing from it and ~login webpages will still be served. This sort
of modification should help greatly with uptime and load balancing.
15-May-01
Major hardware failure (sdf-2, now called 'otaku') basically overheated
and fried its motherboard when its powersupply fan died. On top of
that, SDF's root disk (main drive) decided to give up and die. This is
the third disk we've lost this year. Crappy consumer hardware.
09-Aug-01
, ,
/( )`
\ \___ / |
BYE BYE LEENOX! /- _ `-/ '
BYE BYE x86! (/\/ \ \ /\
/ / | ` \
| ) / |
`-^--'`< '
? (_.) ) /
_o) `.__ ` /
/\\ __ `-----' /
(O_ _\/V / \---. __ / __ \
(o< //\ \\/---|====O)))==) \) /====
//\ V|/_ (._ (o_/\ >-)---' `--' `.__,' \
V_/_ | /\\<--)-> , | |
(:_ (~< //\ \_/_\/ \ /
/ /\ //\ V_/_ (._ ` ______( (_ / \_____
\/_/_ (o_ V\/_ (/) , ,' ,-----' | \
(\) (o_ (-< . `--{__________) (smj) \/
(O_ >O) //\ (~< //\.- (fl)
/ (\) V_/_ _|_ V\/_ .
//\ //L\\
Oo.V|/_ V\_/V
- -
10-Aug-01 - The minicomputers return!
System Configuration:
'sdf' Dec ALPHA 5305, 1024mb of RAM, 55gig SCA SCSI-2 UW
NetBSD 1.5.1 performance tuned and hacks
role: 'users' shell server, primary dns, secondary http server,
anonymous ftp server
'otaku' Dec ALPHA 5305, 1024mb of RAM, 60gig SCA SCSI-2 UW
NetBSD 1.5.1 performance tuned and hacks
role: 'arpa' shell server, secondary dns, primary http server
00-SEP-01 THE FATE OF THE OLD 3B2/500 THAT WAS SDF
I just learned what happened to the 3B2/500 I lent to user '*****' who had
hopes to buy it when he got money. It came into his possession in late
1997 or 1998 when I decided to try to run SDF on x86 with linux (the
biggest mistake I've made, and I apologise). I gave '*****' the complete
3B2/500 setup, a full set of manuals, software and a 4425 AT&T Death Star
terminal. When he moved out of his mother's house in 1999 he put it in
the trunk of his car. It stayed there for 6 months!! through the Texas
heat. He once went to '**'s house to pick up his friend and they decided
they needed some trunk space, so they took the 3B2 out and brought it up
to the house. '**' really hates UNIX and refused to allow the machine in
the house, so they left it on his porch. It sat there for 3 months,
through the rain and elements. '**' finally put into 'storage' with
some other computers, but I seriously doubt it will ever run again.
'*****' never paid a cent to sdf and will not respond to my emails from
is new email address (he no longer uses sdf).
10-OCT-01 SDF Public Access UNIX System, INC.
On this day, the entity SDF Public Access UNIX System was formed
as a NOT-FOR-PROFIT corporation in the state of Delaware.
22-DEC-01 - 27-DEC-01 MULTIHOMED DS3 CONNECTION
The 'sdf' along with 'otaku', 'sverige', 'neguse' and 'norge' were moved
to a new datacentre location in Bellevue Washington. Besides the luxury
of having a cooled machine room, high availability UPS and monitored site
security, we also gained a multi-homed 155mbit connection to the net.
Although only 'sdf' and 'sverige' were production machines at the time,
the others were installed in preparation for 'SHIT DAY 01-JAN-02'
Total 'sdf' downtime was exceptionally minimal during the move (1 hour).