Welcome to L0stG33k! |
Computers have long been more than a hobby for me, I’ve been drawn to them as long as I can remember. From the moment I finally went from being a dial-up user to suddenly having an always-on and insanely fast cable broadband connection, I’ve been very interested in servers. All along though, I’ve enjoyed experimenting with various configurations, hardware and operating systems.
I’ve always had my own server(s) at home. For one thing or another; I’ve hosted content on everything from a dog-house sized IBM Netfinity (4x Pentium Pro 200) to Dual Celerons, Dual Pentium IIIs, Dual Xeons, Dual Athlon MPs, and dual Opterons. Back in years past it catered more towards online gaming. These days I do it just to post stuff like this, I guess. The net has had so much cool stuff on it, so much has gotten lost to time and that is an absolute shame. Thankfully things like Archive.org exist!
Here is a preview of a little project I started 10 years ago now… Basically building the system I could have only dreamed of owning around 2003 – 2004. Dual Athlon MP CPUs, an Nvidia 6800 GT and half a dozen 15,000 RPM U320 drives in RAID 0. Water cooled, of course. All packed into the first custom PC case I’d ever owned, the Antec Superlanboy; an all aluminum beauty. Someday I’ll finish it! Lacking the room at the moment. (See Full size)
| In the beginning… |
Simply put, it is alternative spelling, if you’d call it that, for Lost Geek. LostGeek as a name was not my original idea, I must confess. It was the domain name of ProCooling’s IRC server back in the day… I was doing some things over there 15 years ago and I always really liked the name. Thanks Joe!
The stylized “leet speak”/1337 spelling comes from another friend, whom goes by the handle of Darkelarious. 19 years ago him and I started 
333 Networks, which started as a group dedicated to modding Unreal Tournament and providing customized community game servers along with online services. This included a re-implementation of the epic / gamespy master server service that allows online multiplayer games. When the original servers went MIA, Darkelarious came to the rescue with a new master server he wrote. This ran on a linux box in my basement, as for the time, I had a pretty solid internet connection with a static IP.
Computers have been a life long fascination for me, I’ve been drawn to them as long as I can remember. From the moment I finally went from dial-up to cable broadband in 2005 I became very interested in servers, experimenting with various configurations, hardware and operating systems over the years.
Some of my favorite “production” servers, for my self hosted sites and services were real purpose built servers… others, may surprise you. Probably my favorite enterprise level server was a Compaq Proliant dual P4 Xeon box. I think it idled consuming over 200 watts, but it was a beast. The more I learned, and the more I observed, my needs for computing horsepower weren’t all that high. As a matter of fact, after a couple years I considered my ideal solution to be something a lot less powerful and much, much more efficient.
The last couple years of my basement hosting were done on a system I purpose built from used gear I already had, with the focus on low power use without sacrificing performance. This consisted of a desktop class PC, stripped down to the bare minimal components needed for a server. It had a micro atx motherboard with a 1300 MHz Tualatin Celeron and 512MB of ram. It had VGA and fast ethernet on the motherboard, all I added on was a 40 GB ide hard drive and power supply. This server performed wonderfully, especially considering that it drew only 29 watts, according to my kill-a-watt meter.
I was pretty serious about uptime, and the main motivator for a low power draw was longer UPS runtime. On my Belkin 800VA, with two brand new 7 amp hour batteries I think I could get at least a couple hours — WRT54G & SB5100 included. It was a long time ago, but if memory serves, this kept me up without a hitch. I don’t think we had any outages that lasted longer than I could keep my server and internet up, so mission accomplished. Self hosting can be a ton of fun, and be incredibly rewarding. And well, that’s why I’m back at it! These are my stories.
– Ben