[HECnet] Introduction and two new systems online

Hi all, My name is Lex van Roon, and for quite some time I've been lurking on this list as a DEC/VMS enthusiast and today I got my link to HECnet working with the help of Johnny. Somewhere during the 90s, a high-school classmate of mine gave me a couple of copies of Hacktic(*). In there I read about these operating systems with weird names like VMS and UNIX, and since I only knew MS based OS's back then, I was intrigued. I soon got my first Linux box running under x86, and not long thereafter I got my first whitelabel Alpha mainboard, on which I happily ran BSD and Linux. After dropping out of school, I went to work as a sysadmin in the UNIX world during the end of the dotcom boom, and nowadays I'm a DevOps engineer working for a large dutch .com. As a hobby, I've been running various Alpha's (and other RISC iron) over the years: - Whitelabel AXPCI133 - AS1000 (lots of them) - PWS 466au - DS10/DS20/DS25 - ES47 and since a couple of years, I finally wiped UNIX off my Alpha's and installed VMS, and have used them for various things. Mostly replicating services I'd normally run under UNIX (dns, ntp, http), but also for software development in C and Python(**). In this time, I've discovered that it's very helpful to know people who know VMS very well (thnx Steven Hoffman), and I am confident enough about my VMS skills that I decided to join, since being in a DECnet with my own systems is not such an interesting learning experience as working with 'the real thing' :) For now I'm online with the following two Alpha's: REI / 1.540 / AlphaServer DS10 / 466MHz / 1GB ram / 2 x 18GB u2w 10k PAI / 1.541 / AlphaServer DS25E / 1GHz / 1GB ram / 6 x 73GB u320 15k In the future, I plan/hope to get my VAX 4000/200 connected, but that system still needs some TLC before it will operate. Most likely I will also spin up some emulated instances of various other DEC operating systems in the future, for learning/discovery purposes. The systems are connected to a 100mbit FttH uplink, located in Amersfoort, The Netherlands and are available 24/7. I have not yet configured any guest accounts, but I intend to do this. Kind Regards, Lex van Roon *) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack-Tic **) https://github.com/r3boot/pki -- LRO-RIPE | 570DE0BE | 9BF5 922E AF87 8584 E9CA C3AD C508 39A9 570D E0BE