Hecate 

Hecate (heca-tee) is the main server of the BedroomLAN. In fact, vennea.demon.co.uk is really this machine, not vennea.bedroomlan as one would expect. Hecate is based on an AMD K6 running at 333 MHz. Hecate has 160 Mb of RAM and 30 Gb of HDD space. She owns a SCSI-over-parallel ZIP drive and a real SCSI bus connected to an external enclosure housing a 4/8G IBM/Seagate tape drive (which I'm trying to sell) and a NEC 40x SCSI CD-ROM. Hecate controls a conventional modem (currently unused) and is connected through Ethernet to our 0.5 MBps cable modem. Two other ethernet interfaces talk to the LAN's 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps ethernet subnets (this incarnation of Hecate the server is a real Trioditis). As such, Hecate is the network's gateway, firewall and router/switch between our separate thin Ethernet and fast Ethernet subnetworks (hey, we actually have an internet at home). She's also our nameserver, local web server, mail server, news server, squid WWW caching server, file server, FTP server, logging host, X11 font server, printer server for our networked HP LaserJet 4 printer and (phew) SMB server for Windows shares. Pretty busy for an ‘obsolete’ box (you'd probably need around 2 to 3 NT boxes for all that, no matter what size the local network). Debian GNU/Linux is, of course, the operating system of choice. Hecate typically stays up for months on end, the record being ten months (304 days, in particular). In all cases so far, downtime was caused by me checking hardware and upgrading the kernel. So much about Linux being extremely unstable, eh?

Hecate is named after the ancient Greek deity of the same name (Thessalian in origin). Hecate was worshiped in several aspects. Hecate Trioditis protected junctions where three roads met. She was a northern fertility and mother goddess. Some claim her followers were the first to practice witchcraft as it's ‘known’ today (nothing like Wicca, and I'll happily bind your flames to /dev/null, blessed be). Her triple nature is evidenced all over Greek mythology and Hecate appears as various other goddesses. Just look for triple goddesses, above and beyond the Olympian gods and you'll see. Bonus points for spotting the maiden-mother-crone ones. Hecate, of course, is a lunar goddess. With Hecate connecting three networks together, her name again makes sense: she's at the junction of our old, coaxial segment, our newer 100 Mbit Ethernet, and the outside world, whatever that is.

Change Log

2002-07-04

Planned downtime for Hecate. I did general preventive maintenance and cleaning. Changed an aging CPU fan in the process. I also installed 64 Mbytes of SDRAM (from Vennëa's old memory configuration), increasing the machine's main memory to 160 Mbytes. Finally, I installed a faster 100BaseTX card for the internal fast subnet (it's an SMC implementation of the DEC 21114 chipset, which is pretty nippy).