This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be making about how the Iron Council network has evolved and grown and will continue to.  First, a bit of history.

The Iron Council network is named in honor of the book of the same title by China Mieville.  I originally got the ironcouncil.net domain name from a thing where Microsoft was giving away free domains to use with Office Live Online Beta or something, then got the unlock code from a Microsoft CSR and pointed DNS to nearlyfreespeech.net’s DNS servers, where my DNS is based to date.  I transferred the domain to NameSecure after a year, worried that MSFT would cancel it, and I plan on transferring to NameCheap because I get a free SSL cert (Comodo, but hey, free) that way.

Speaking of nearlyfreespeech.net, this blog, the RIT Sentinel (see links on the right), and a handful of other sites are hosted on my account there.  The service I’ve recieved from them is nothing less than stellar, and the price can’t be beat.

Originally, the IC network consisted of the NSFN sites mentioned above, Google Hosted Services, and kompak, an ancient (2001-ish) Compaq laptop that served as my primary/only PC for a while.  This was late 2006.  Kompak later gave way to hppie (an HP desktop) and faded into oblivion.  At some point, I purchased a Virtual Private Server from vpsFarm (I don’t really recommend them) and dubbed it crobuzon.  Crobuzon served as my shell (for IRC, mostly) and a just about everything until March 2008, when I discovered I could get a tiny VPS from prgmr for a quarter the price.  This new VPS was duly dubbed dryfall, and everything I wanted from crobuzon was migrated to dryfall.  Most recently, hppie ran into heat problems (due to three hard drives stacked with no breathing room in between, I believe) and was replaced by slake, a custom-built midrange gaming machine.

Dryfall is my main server now.  My opentapes, my personal image hosting, my IRC shell, a DNS subzone, postfix including relay to slake via UUCP, Dovecot IMAP, and probably services I’m forgetting.  It also intermittently runs icecast in a vserver instance (yes, a vserver instance on a Xen domU kernel – it can be done) known as dryice.

I’m planning to add a VPS hosted by rapidxen to the IC network.  News on that when it gets added, but for now, anyone suggest a name for the new arrival?