Gridley was once a women's dormitory at Carleton College. The name now refers to the student-run Unix box that sits in the corner of CMC 102.
Information about the current status of Gridley can be found on the Caucus conference Gridley Does Caucus.
The current student administrator for Gridley is Travis Raines '11 (rainest).
Accounts
If you are a Carleton alumnus, student, staff member, or faculty member, you can have a Gridley account. Just tell us your e-mail address, agree to the Academic User Agreement, and we'll set you up.
Purpose
Gridley functions as a shell server for students and alums. This includes hosting webpages with scripting capabilities. Upon request, Gridley is also capable of hosting a "VirtualHost" for users so that they can have a URL such as http://somedomain.org rather than the default http://gridley.res.carleton.edu/~gridleyuser. The user is responsible for registering the domain name and pointing their domain to Gridley's IP address.
Gridley currently hosts 173 accounts, 36 of which have had successful shell logins in the past six months. (This does not necessarily mean the other accounts are not active, just that a user has not actually logged into the server in the past six months. There most likely is still content in their home directories, and content being served over the web from their accounts.)
Gridley also used to host a free email account for users, although this service has been discontinued. Carleton now provides ample mailspace for students, and there are ample opportunities on the internet to have free non-Carleton email.
Hardware
Gridley is currently an AMD Athlon 900 with 768MB RAM and 30GB of user space. It runs Debian GNU/Linux. Beweeen January and September 2005, Gridley ran on Gentoo Linux. Prior to January 2005, it ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gridley's current set of hardware was thrown together from a number of decommissioned ITS servers in 2004. The case used to belong to a server known as "Dewar," the motherboard and redundant power supply from "Constantinople" (previously known as "Istanbul"), and the SCSI disks from a variety of servers. The IDE drives are from the previous Gridley box, along with a generous donation of an 80GB drive from Paul Wilmes '07 that currently stores all users' home directories. The server also has a "blower" exhaust fan above one PCI slot - a token added by admin Michael Moore '06 that sat in his room for years with no purpose. It was the result of a purchase of cables for DVD Fest 2004 that didn't add up to the $25 necessary for free shipping. (Without the fan, the total was $24.25. Shipping would have added $4.)
From Jan 2003 - June 2004, Gridley was a K6-2/400 with 272MB RAM and 7GB of user space. It ran Debian GNU/Linux.
It formerly was a K6-2/300 with 128 MB RAM and 2 GB user space and lived in the case of an old 486. It ran FreeBSD.
The original machine, upgraded in January 1999, was an i486dx/66 with 16MB on those cute little 32 pin SIMMS. Gridley originally ran Linux. It was converted to FreeBSD round about 1997.
Administrators
The current student administrator for Gridley is Travis Raines '11 (rainest).
Gridley administrators have always been current students at Carleton College. Past administrators include:
- Kyle Kingsbury '09
- Reid Gilman '09
- Michael Moore '06
- Ethan Sommer '03
- Matt Strait '03
IP History
- 137.22.100.1 - August 2003 - Present.
- 137.22.96.1 - prior to August 2003. This was changed to the present IP address as the new NetReg server needed to occupy this address.
DNS History
- Gridley.Res.Carleton.edu - since August 2003
- Gridley.ACNS.Carleton.edu - prior to August 2003. Gridley has always been on the ResNet (and ACNS was renamed ITS), so the hostname was changed to clear up any confusion.