Nov 17 2003

I just gotta brag; this is so darn cool for me, having been merely a User all these years.

The servers, which I've been rambling about recently are online now.

Several years ago, I set up my first server, in my apartment, to serve files and test webpages before putting them online. I marveled at the server -- it had no keyboard, no monitor, no disk drives, and only two cables (power and network). Lights blinked and hard drives whirred...it was doing things, but you couldn't see what it was doing.

Last Tuesday I hauled the servers down to Multiband's Fargo offices, plugged them in, and locked them in a cage. I sat on the floor, configuring them remotely from my laptop, right next to a guy doing exactly the same thing for his enormous rackmount server array. When I got back to work, I pinged my servers...and they responded.

These are MY COMPUTERS. And they're SERVING THINGS. As promised, Apathy Industries is the first domain to move. When you click that link, your computer goes out and asks one of my servers (a computer assembled from a case pulled from a dumpster, drives & fans cut from an old Macintosh, and a network card from god-knows-where) for the IP address. That server, a machine I've held in my hands and have the right to go down and flip it's switch to the off position whenever I like, responds. It responds by telling you that apathyindustries.com is mapped to the IP address of my OTHER server down there, a Dell-designed genuine server with multiple processors and lots of RAM. Your computer then goes over to the Dell and says, "send me the webpage."

The Dell does as you ask.

Is that cool or what? This isn't some toy, it's not something that you have to stop by my house to see. It's out there, for everyone to touch, and I can do anything I want to it. It's mine, it's free to roam the internet, and it's begging for work to do.