Computers/Sting

What It Is

Sting is my dual P2-350 128meg 256meg Asus P2B-D webserver/router/firewall/backup/you-name-it box.

It is named for the dagger which Bilbo and later Frodo used in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings.

Sting_front_2015-01-01.jpg IMG_4113.jpg IMG_20101101_072133.jpg IMG_4118.jpg

History

Sting has been my home network keystone since about 2004. It’s an old slow dog that never quits.

The Uptime Saga

  • Back in college, I was excited when it hit uptimes of 90 and 53 days.
  • I moved to Chicago in 2006 and made some money, and bought a UPS. That helped.
  • After a year, living at my Hutchinson St apartment, the uptime grew. It prompted me to write a simple uptime tracking service for my computers, so I would have a proper record aside this page.
  • Less than 12 hours before I moved out of that apartment, it crashed due to a disk controller fault at an uptime of 279 days.
  • I moved to my Washtenaw Ave apartment in 2008, replaced the disk controller and disks with hand-me-down SATA disks, and left it on from December 2008 onwards.
  • In May 2010, I moved from the ground floor to the top floor of the apartment on Washtenaw Ave. I planned and executed a successful move of Sting whilst on, with it’s UPS in hand!
  • On November 1st 2010, the power supply in Sting finally gave way and it died in the middle of the night, at 687 days up. 94% of the way to two years. I replaced the power supply with a new gigantic one from Cooler Master.
  • In 2011 I moved to China and left Sting with my friend Dan. Disks from mc were consolidated into sting, and mc found a dumpster.
    • Unfortunately Sting was taken offline a few months later, and was in storage for 3 years.
  • In December 2014 Sting was installed to the Weir house. Set up with an automatic shutdown when idle, and a monthly power-on schedule for the 13th at 07:00 UTC, sting will surface from time to time.

I may never beat 687 days with a real physical computer of my own.

Software

Sting runs GNU/Linux with a 2.6 kernel. It’s primary based on Slackware 10.2 and Dropline Gnome 2.14.

It has been massively upgraded over the years. 2.4 to 2.6 was a bit of a challenge, and I’ve found my /usr/local to be extensive.

It runs lots of fun services like:

  • Apache 2.0 web server with PHP 5
  • SSH and OpenVPN servers
  • Exim SMTP server
  • Subversion server
  • Internal services like a Netfilter firewall, VPN bridge and DHCP server, DNS server with custom records and an NTP server.
  • Tunnels or proxies several services from mc for music sharing.

If sting is online, you can visit sting’s web interface at sting.vanstaveren.us which is proxied from sam over a vpn. If sting is unavailable (which is true most of the time) you will get a friendly error page.