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Geeky Details I've got three machines at the moment, two home-made Intel boxes, and a Sony Vaio 505 (which actually belongs to work). The old Intel box is actually built in the case of my first PC, which was a 486DX2/66 (remember when they were shit hot?). It's now home to a P166-MMX, on an A-BIT PR5B board, Matrox Mystique graphics, 64 MB RAM, network card and runs Linux (and needs a bigger HD, when I get around to it). It runs DNS for smashing.net and MX service using exim. The exim is configured using the MAPS RBL, DUL, and RSS. It also has manually configured anti-spam lists of both hosts and common spam originating domains/addresses, which I maintain myself. You have probably now gathered I'm not too keen on getting spam. This machine also crunches Seti@Home units in it's spare time, using a heavily reniced process. It's not a blazingly fast machine, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't need to be grossly overpowered to run a lightly loaded Linux. I got around to upgrading the Doze machine this summmer. It runs Windows 98, and was a P2-266 until a couple of months ago. It's now a P3-600 Coppermine, ASUS P3B "Flagship" motherboard, Nvidia Geforce graphics (on an ASUS board), SB Live, 13 Gig HD, CD-ROM, 128MB RAM, network card, PCMCIA support, and lives in a full height tower case I picked up for nothing. There's also a virgin partition waiting to have NT or Win2K stuck on it, eventually. A growing addiction to Flight Sim 2000 forced the upgrade during the summer - and the Geforce does really nice fluffy clouds <g>. I now have I'll probably build a new machine during autumn, using the old P2-266 and motherboard - probably a new Linux machine. I just need to blag a case from somewhere. Why pay for stuff when you can salvage it from a skip? The Vaio is a N505X, Intel Celeron 366 and 64MB RAM. It belongs to work, and runs Windows 98. Another thing on my list to do is put RedHat on this machine, it's just putting the time in to get things like the PCMCIA and sound support working. It's a pretty big investment. Then there's the fact it belongs to work, and they may just give me a new machine one day, and all that time is pretty much down the drain. I've got Xircom 10/100 Ethernet/Modem, and Lucent Wavelan cards for it. My connectivity is provided by work, in the form of a BT Kilostream line, running from our PoP at Telehouse. It's not mega fast, but at least it's low latency, and always on. Sometimes I wish I had stayed in my old flat, where Level3 were building a fibre ring which ran past my front door, I may have even been able to get some Dark Fibre... drool. Well, maybe I'll upgrade to ADSL once I move. A Cisco 2610 router sits this end of the line. www.smashing.net is not hosted on my network, but lives on a Sun E250 dedicated web server at my old work place (Direct Connection), and runs Solaris and Apache. The forms to email script came from MSA, and bits of JavaScript came from the JavaScript Source pages. I mainly use Paint Shop Pro for fiddling with graphics, and sometimes The GIMP (if I'm using X). The HTML is cut in a mixture of (an old version of) HomeSite, and various "text editors du jour".

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