(Back to Info/Help Page)

(In)Frequently Asked Questions

Can I get multiple e-mail accounts?
    Nope! One per system account. And one system account per human being.
If I don't know anyone on VectorStar, how can I get an account?
    Get to know somebody. Laird's a nice guy. If you really plan on using your account, and not for spamming/phishing/cracking/etc, he'll probably hook you up.
Can I use VectorStar to sell products and/or services?
    In most circumstances, no. If you create a product or service which is produced, used, and sold without any dependency on VectorStar itself (for example, woodcraft), That's fine. However, you cannot sell any product or service which is accomplished by directly using VectorStar (hosting, mailing lists, computational operations) or its resources (uh, bandwidth). Why is this a big deal? Cause we're not a registered business. We're not operating on commercially-zoned land, and we don't want any trouble from the zoning commission (or anyone else for that matter!)
If I have a virtual (FULL) domain, but want to change its domain name, what do I have to do?
    This service is no longer offered. We are now only offering subdomains. You can change to a subdomain by logging in on the main page and editing your account features.

What's up with the weird names you give your servers?
    Ahh, weird names. Vector (well, that one made sense, sort of), berzerker, spooky, germany, mexicanhouseboy, schlagen_sie_es_der_hinderteilen, thrall, holocaust, apathy, chester, angstful, deuce, bulldog... Each name represents the "personality" we see in that particular server. It gives people a feeling of what that machine is like, how it behaves, whether it likes them, hates them, or plainly doesn't care.
    Here's a personality (disorder) breakdown of our servers, past and present:
    • Vector - the director, the motivator, the catalyst for the project. Tried and true, it's a straight shooter that just gets the job done. Originally a AMD 586/133, then a garage-sale P133 on a Tyan server board, it spent the next 5 years as an Ireland-made ECC PII 266. The capacitors on the motherboard finally had enough. This server is sorely missed.
    • Berzerker - originally a test machine (Vector's old P133 setup)- a box I could go completely freak-nuts on and not worry about breaking stuff. And you'd better believe I broke stuff.
    • spooky - If you saw spooky's FRIGHTENING case and hardware, you'd understand.
    • germany - my first SPARC. This box was hard-f'ing-core. It was capable of running as a firewall, mail server, AND do 30fps OpenGL rendering on a **remote** XSession! This machine was the start of my SPARC love affair.
    • mexicanhouseboy - think of a goofy looking kid-butler with a few missing teeth in his goofy smile. This machine is an oddball with a jovial sense of humor. As long as the INS doesn't show up, he will run obediently forever. First used as a shell server in 2000-2001, he was our main firewall from late 2002 through February 2006. We are STILL using MHB as our backup firewall.
    • schlagen_sie_es_der_hinderteilen - This is a terrible babelfish translation of "hit it in the butt". This machine is a piece of crap - a 25mhz SPARC that couldn't do ANYthing useful, so we decided to make it our "uptime" server and see how long we could keep it up. 364 days, then a huge power outage.
    • thrall - Indentured servitude. This machine was a beaten workhorse that was relegated to being a wide-open public testing server. Any user could go on that machine and develop, compile and run code. It oftentimes saw system loads of 60 and above!!
    • holocaust - our original dual Xeon setup. The CPU's didn't match, only one chip had a heatsink. The board was screwed onto a tabletop with the power supply sitting beside it. This thing looked like it spent its working life in Auschwitz concentration camp. Thus the name.
    • apathy - Holocaust's new name, once it got a proper CPU pair, good RAM, LVD SCSI and a bad-ass case. This machine didn't give a good god damn what you threw at it - it just did the work and waited for more. After angstful died, Apathy stepped back up to the plate in nearly its original config (ATA RAID instead of SCSI), slow, steady and stable. It has since been retired again.
    • chester - Our second Dual Xeon. Built to be identical to Apathy.... but it wasn't. Despite the fact that it had the "exact same" board, it used different memory... and it didn't like SCSI. It always worked fine, but it was sort of a screwball. The sort of character you never take your eye off of... like the Ice Cream Man, "Chester the Molestor". As we expected, the board was a little shady. It took a bad BIOS flash one day and that was the last we saw of the Xeon board. It was reborn as an Athlon 1600+ on an KT133A board - once again, a pretty shady setup. It fried on us, and then became a Duron 700. The RAM has been fried and replaced once since the switch to a Duron. It was used for a few months as our firewall when our first flash-based firewall died. Definitely still a screwball.
    • angstful - angstful was my long-time workstation. A BX system that people said couldn't be overclocked, but it always was... running a 133 bus since 1998! Hah! Beat that, bitch! This machine was the leanest, meanest, hawrdest BX-based system ever to exist in the universe. Sum'bitch ran 135fps in Quake II with a single VoodooII and a PII-350! When this motherboard got handed down from my workstation to a server, the name had to stay! In November 2005, the motherboard gave up the ghost. 7 years of dutiful, overclocked service.
    • deuce - aside from being a dual-processor PIII 800EB, it's also a piece of crap. Well, not really. It's just that the motherboard won't run by itself from a cold boot. It needs someone to tap the reset switch once, and then it's fine. Deuce was then moved to a P4 2.4ghz box.
    • bulldog - identical to deuce, except that it's a single PIII 1.2g Tualatin. It'll rub your face into a boat dock when you least expect it. Bulldog was moved to a P4 2.4ghz system.

      And then our names get boring...

    • fw - This was a PC-on-a-PCI-card system that I got for $2.00. With a CompactFlash adapter it ran as a solid-state firewall for around a year before its memory controller fried.
    • gw - the original bulldog, 1.2ghz Tualatin. Firewall and gateway, its OpenBSD PF configuration is impressive - transparent bridging, firewalling, NAT, QoS, and VLANs. It's using a solid-state CompactFlash drive.
    • vm1 - the original deuce, dual PIII 800EB. Runs VMWare.
    • vm2 - the second deuce, P4 2.4ghz. Runs VMWare.
    • vm3 - the second bulldog, P4 2.4ghz. Runs VMWare.
    • god - Back-end file server (virtual machine)
    • web - Users' web and FTP server (virtual machine)

    Well, that's more than you probably wanted to know about our naming convention.
Do you guys drink a lot?
    Yes. There's a reason we have a dedicated beer fridge. Laird also brews his own beer.
How do you guys afford to do this for free?
    We pay for it out of our own pockets. The current cost for VectorStar is about $200/mo plus equipment repair, etc. If you'd like to be a REALLY nice person and donate some money to help offset our costs, we'd really appreciate it. There's a donations link on the main menu of our site.
What else do you guys do?
    Motorcycles. We do motorcycles in every shape and form. Cruisers, dressers, hot rods, street fighters, tourers, sportbikes, ratbikes, and everything inbetween. As long as it's got two wheels and isn't a step-thru, it's allright by us. Laird is obsessed with Hondas, especially V4s.

    Beer. As mentioned above, Laird brews in his free time. A fan of brown ales and stouts, most of his concoctions provide a healthy kick in the ass to the unsuspecting watery-beer drinker. Truth be told, Bourbon Whiskey is the drink of choice for all of the staff, past and present.

    Music. Frankie, Forge and Frank Sr. have a band called the Sixxxgun Saloon. Frank Sr. is also the frontman for Trilogy.
Last Updated 4-3-2007.