About Polylith
is a small, mostly free-software
driven domain of various and sundry machines. While its purpose (other than
experimentation) often remains a mystery even to myself, it still has grown
a little bit over the past few years. (For a more complete history, see
my page.) Following are Polylith's current
machines (not much by today's standards, but hey, I'm running Linux and
NeXTStep - who needs megahertz, megabytes, and gigabytes?):
is the "foundation" of Polylith, this web server. (For web hit statistics,
see the web stats page). As of 3/20/2000, it's the
old Pyrite (Tyan Tomcat III), but now with dual Pentium 200MHz processors and
88MB RAM, continuously running Linux and providing 45GB of RAID-5 storage,
printing with an old HP PaintJet, and web and other networking services to the
other ether-networked machines. It also takes care
of tape backups using a SCSI Travan 8GB (compressed) drive. Awhile back,
Granite's old display/card was replaced with an S3 ViRGE/GX 4MB video card
and IBM 6091 19" monitor, all for less than $50. For more information on how
to do this, see Polylith's Tech section.
Granite was once an extremely faithful AMD 486DX4 120MHz with 8, then 24, and
finally 72 MB RAM. For more on this upgrade path and benchmarks, see
my page.
was upgraded with a pair of 200MHz Pentium processors and retired to
exclusively run a reliable SMP OS (Linux, of course) as Granite. I have
finally found a permanent machine to replace Pyrite. It is a Tyan Tiger-133
motherboard with dual Pentium III 933MHz processors and 512MB RAM, an ATI
Radeon dual-display card with a pair of 19" monitors (which I now have working
great under Linux). For benchmarks on the original Pyrite,
click here.
Brimstone is an old Compaq upgraded to a 166MHz Pentium providing 24x7
56k dialup and firewall service for all inbound and outbound connections. It
also provides a 4GB web cache via
Squid for all outbound connections.
is a 68040 based upgrade board for the NeXTCube with 16MB
RAM. It runs NeXTStep, of course.
is a 68030 based NeXT mainboard (16MB RAM) that is actually housed within
the same cube as Obsidian. In fact, this board was the original board in
the cube, the original Obsidian. For info on how I hacked the NeXTCube
backplane to drive both cards at the same time, see Polylith's
Tech section. Currently Onyx is offline due to a
hard drive crash.
For more info about Linux and NeXT, see the Tech
section.
Some have asked, "Why the name Polylith?" When I began naming machines as
rocks and minerals, I needed a domain name that reflected this fact. I
needed something like "monolith", but that only meant "one stone", and I
wanted to plan for a couple machines. So why not use "poly" (as in "polygon -
many sides") instead of "mono"? That's how I came up with "Polylith" - "many
stones". Obviously, no one had registered such an obscure name by the time I
had a dedicated phone connection, so that worked out well, too.
-Brendan
