Today I'm going to describe the TGD local network. First, TGD. Basically, my best friend Dave and I have on and off wanted to start our own company to write RPG books. It's nothing serious, but we thought we should have a name for this so-called company. So we came up with TGD, which does stand for something but I don't really remember and Dave and I are not supposed to mention the name at any time. We came up with this like four years ago and I at least haven't said what TGD stands for since then.

A few years ago I moved into an apartment in the same complex as Dave's, officially so I could be closer to work. A year or two later Dave's brother Steve moved into another apartment in the complex. At this point I had been toying with the idea of setting up a LAN to connect our computers. My mistake was mentioning this idea to Dave.

Lo and behold, a few months later, we wired everything up. One main cable leads from my apartment to Steve's, about 100 feet. Another cable goes from Steve's apartment to Dave's, about 125 feet. I think it's plenum cable, but it may just be PVC. The cable goes out my window, to the roof, across the roof and down to Steve's apartment. The other cable runs along a wood fence to Dave's apartment. It took a couple of days to set up.

But now we could play network games in the comfort of our homes. (Before everyone took their computers to my place for a night of Marathon, et al). The cable died that winter, very rainy. So Dave recabled a few months later, and that job has been good for a year and a half at least. Steve moved out, so we just have a cable extender to connect the two cables at Steve's old apartment.

Well, now that we had a network, I wanted to set up a permanent connection to the Internet that we could share. I upgraded my modem account to full-time (at $95 a month) and bought Vicom's Internet Gateway so we could share one IP address. An old Powermac 6100 became our gateway machine (and that machine is still in service today).

Dave then got an old Sun IPX running Unix. That was his project. He's put Apache on it, it has a mail server, Appleshare server, and a bunch of other things. Personally I don't use it -- I keep my stuff on Mac OS machines if I can help it.

Anyway, this setup lasted for a year or so. We set up Internet Gateway to route e-mail, web, and ftp access to the Sun machine. We also registered TGD-INC.COM with Network Solutions.

At the beginning of this year. Dave was yearning for a faster Internet connection, and DSL looked good. I didn't care too much. I just wanted a stable connection, speed was of secondary importance. But eventually he pushed and we got a DSL line installed. Nice speed, although upstream is only about 128kb.

Recently, I upgraded our DSL account for five IP addresses. So now we can run our own primary and secondary DNS servers and be virtually self sufficient. And that's what I really wanted to do all along, be able to have our own Internet presence without using other people's hardware.

So at it stands now, Thales (the Sun) runs our primary services, Jennifer (my PowerMac) runs our secondary services (any my web page, e-mail box, and other personal things). We have a Netopia router to share one of the IP addresses among our client machines (up to 4 clients can be logged in at once). Leaving us with two addresses for future expansion.

Next up for me is to replace Jennifer with a better Macintosh running MacOS X (Server or Client). I'm thinking that I'll get another PowerBook and use my old one as the new server. Once I get some extra cash, of course.