My Computers

I love to tinker on computers and Linux systems. So these are the 'computers' I administrate. From left to right:

q: My main computer in the closet. It used to be my desktop, but since I have a laptop, it is no longer allowed to stay in the living room. This computer does my email (some cyrrus), holds backups incremental backups via rsync), has a proxy-news-server (leafnode). There are some hard drives inside, clustered via lvm and some RAID for my emails and AIM logfiles. Also, a mysql database with my banking data runs here. (Debian AMD64)

heimat-q: My connection to the FeM-network, the rather private network of 1500 students at my old university. I used to be an Administrator there and am thus allowed to have some old box standing there. It mostly does VPN services for me. It's uptime record is 439 days :) Some Debian.

oma-laptop: That's a cheap laptop I bought for my grandma. It is mostly used as a picture frame in my granny's kitchen. I sometimes show her pictures when we call each other, but most times it just shows a picture of me ;) Some ubuntu.

(none): This is my granny's Fritz!Box. We recently got her a telephone flatrate, so she got a FritzBox, which can run gkrellmd. The fritzbox mostly publishes my granny's IP address to dynalias.org and does some port-forwardings to her laptop (VNC and ssh). I do not (yet) have a VPN to my granny's place -- but the FritzBox can do openvpn, so at some point I might do that.

tq: That's my TV-computer. It doesn't have any disk inside and just sits under the TV. It is great for playing movies via mplayer or just watching hulu shows. Its root filesystem is on q. (ubuntu)

polaris: My university computer. With its two screens it is perfect to browse facebook and to write papers at the same time. It mostly openvpns such that I can access papers from ACM etc. from home. And it functions as VPN-to host when I am on the road with my laptop. (Debian sid)

soekris: This is a tiny soekris box. It used to be the gateway to the internet, but my room mates think the linksys has better throughput. Anyways, soekris still does a lot of useful things. Most importantly, it runs an asterisk server that gives me a landline here in the US (530 231 4774) and one in Germany (036702 18318). Together with a Sipura SIP-to-POTS box that connects my standard wireless phone to the asterisk, I can call my granny and mum for free and have good rates in the US. Besides this, soekris manages vpns to polaris and heimat-q. (Debian)

qtop: My laptop, a lovely Thinkpad T60. It pre-empted my large desktop computer, and ever since I use it for day-to-day work. It runs some debian sid. I have my hard drive encrypted to protect my keys and data if the latop would get stolen. (Debian, of course)