I have stumbled across an absolute gem of online fun over at sdf.org. A huge thanks to a good friend for pointing me towards it this year. What is SDF you might ask? Straight from their website:

The Super Dimension Fortress is a networked community of free software authors, teachers, students, researchers, hobbyists, enthusiasts and the blind. It is operated as a federally recognised non-profit 501(c)7 and is supported by its members.

Our mission is to provide remotely accessible computing facilities for the advancement of public education, cultural enrichment, scientific research and recreation. Members can interact electronically with each other regardless of their location using passive or interactive forums. Further purposes include the recreational exchange of information concerning the Liberal and Fine Arts.

Members have access to games, email, usenet, chat, bboard, gopherspace, webspace, programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and more. The SDF community is made up of caring, highly skilled people who operate behind the scenes and in the underground to maintain a non-commercial INTERNET.

While we did initially start out on a single computer in 1987, the SDF is now a network of 8 64bit enterprise class servers running NetBSD realising a combined processing power of over 21.1 GFLOPS!

Our mass storage configuration is comprised of 60 spindles of mostly 36.4gb and a few 9.1gb SCA LVD SCSI drives using DIGITAL Storage Works hotswap disk arrays. We have roughly 2 terabytes of storage online.

We are networked via two sprintlink T1s and a T1 to savvis. We do BGP peering and try out best to load balance between the links via a CISCO 7xxx router/switch. We are using a ‘swamp’ class C 192.94.73 which has basically been assigned to our site admin along with his class C back when you could request one from the INTERNIC without much fuss

It is quite the trove of command line fun and the phlogs and bboards are full of tons of useful info. I have spent the time learning more about shell commands and profiles, but the majority of my time is spent just reading. It is such a relief to absorb info from the CLI. And I suppose there is a certain charm about about sending a dollar through snail mail to become a validated user. Hope to see you on there!