Welcome to eComStation.org, the only website you know of that has the dog hair blown out of the servers every month or so. eComStation.org is owned by Piggy (Chris Rosenboom) and news is maintained by Crimson Parallax. I no longer use OS/2 or really have any affilliation with the site but Crimson still does.

The site started out in 1997 as a personal page called The "Not Very Nice at All" OS/2 Page on a free account at Geocities, and within 6 months was  moved to private hosting. It still is a personal site no matter how big or elaborate it may get. Through the years the site was hosted by people from EFNET like Moondog and Ltning but in the end I got a broadband account and started hosting it myself on a poor little 386 running Warp 4. It actually got Slashdott'ed once, and survived somehow. I still don't understand HOW it stayed up. (That's way back when Cox was using RoadRunner and up/down was symmetric with about 5 Mbit [3xT-1] upstream. Far better than their current offerings.)

In May of 2001 the site became ecomstation.org. There was about a year that I shutdown the site because Cox felt they needed to block port 80 traffic. Once they blocked inbound port 25 they had become completely useless to me so they were replaced with a better provider.

The site is still hosted from my living room, but now on a business level broadband internet connection on "not brand new",  but more than adequate Compaq Proliant servers. I do end up running a ton of linux over here due to the nature of my work, but the web site will always be powered by an OS/2 based server. I've always felt that if you're going to do a site this related to a specific operating system then you must host it on that OS. Otherwise it implies that it can't handle it.

The servers:

Web / SQL and Primary file server: (proteus) Compaq Proliant ML370. I'll grab a second processor for it sometime. Running: OS/2 Warp 4.52 (MCP2), Apache w/ PHP and MySQL.

Win32 app server: (cronus) IBM xSeries 200 eServer. Running Windows 2000 Server / Citrix Metaframe 1.8 with Active Directory. It is the LANs domain controller.

Mail and Secondary file server: (elektra) Compaq Proliant 800. Running: CentOS 3.9

Tertiary file server: (rhea) Compaq Proliant 800. Running: CentOS 3.9

RSync backup: (echo) Compaq Deskpro SB. Running CentOS 4.6

Media Server: A Windows XP machine is hidden from view. Houses all the local audio, video, etc.

iMac Snow (Melete) Basically a toy to play with OS X. It's hooked to my amp and Yamaha monitors to listen to music while I'm geekin'.

Firewall-1 (stheno) and Firewall-2 (euryale) - fairly identical old machines (P166). One is SCSI, the other IDE. They are running iptables based firewalls on Slackware Linux. They are also the DNS servers for ecomstation.org and a few other domains.

That is my workstation on the far right. It's a Core2 Duo (2.13GHz x 2) and it runs Windows XP Pro x64 and Fedora Core 8. There is also a Wyse Winterm with an embedded Citrix ICA client just to the left of the workstation... no real reason for it's existence....

The fans make an assload of noise. Yet I'm still usually sitting next to them.

click on the image for the larger version.