Mvgrafx
The name 'mvgrafx' originated as a brand name of sorts that I came up with in junior high school. Being the geek that I am, I thought it was pretty cool. It was originally spelled 'MV GrafX' - two separate words with capitalization. I would often use the text '© MV GrafX Productions' to sign off my work in certain classes. Notably english and computers.
At that time I was just starting to get into having my own computers that were more capable than the early Commodore models. So of course, the operating systems installed were MS-DOS with Windows 3.1. The notion of naming a computer was foreign to me.
Then one summer between my grade 10 and 11 years, A friend introduced me to the Linux operating system. I was quick to install it on my desktop computer. When during the setup I was prompted for a computer name, MV GrafX came to mind immediately. Of course, spaces and capitals didn't really work as a hostname, so it became mvgrafx. Ever since that point one of my computers has been named that.
The original mvgrafx as a server came about during the end of my first year at Acadia (1998). A friend in my dorm was selling off his workstation - a Pentium 133. Which to me at that time was an incredible upgrade in hardware from my Pentium 75. It also came with a full-size AT case which was about the same as a flashy car amongst certain geeks.
The server remained much as it was during my second year. It was during my third year (1999-2000) however, that another significant upgrade took place when I managed to get a new motherboard and an AMD K6/2 450Mhz CPU. It was on this hardware base that Sean and I began to create a forum site that we would name AcadiaGeeks.
During the summer before my 4th year (2000) Sean helped get me a co-op position at the NRC in Halifax where he was already doing his co-op. While we were at work a gradual power overage followed by an outtage (which I believe is to be blamed on work being done on a substation at that time by NS Power) caused my power supply and one of my hard drives to fail. Sean graciously donated a new power supply, while my hard earned wages reluctantly donated a new hard drive. Sean and I spent most of the next day at work rebuilding the site from backups. I made attempts to hold NS Power responsible for the damage, however they blamed an electrical storm (despite my providing of weather records for the day indicating clear skies). I didn't have the time or resources to argue against a brick wall like that for what amounted to less than $200 in damage, but the whole experience left me sour against NS Power.
Later that summer at NRC, among the tasks assigned to Sean and I was the cleaning out of a basement storage room. There I found a truly massive AT case lying abandonned. I convinced the IT manager to let me have it and the internals of mvgrafx were transplanted into their new home.
Little changed with the hardware for many years after that. The server happily served pages, IRC chats and performed other duties with its 450MHz and 256MB.
It was around mid-September 2005 when I made a deal with Bignose to purchase a used rackmount server from him. Containing dual Pentium III CPUs at 500MHz a piece with 512MB of memory, it very effectively more than doubled the processing capacity of the server.
However, the SCSI subsystem of that server was finicky at best and catastrophic at worst and so mvgrafx was short lived in that home.
Shortly after I moved into a house in the Spring of 2006 I migrated the contents of the server to my then-desktop, an AMD Athlon Firebird 1.4GHz with a full 1 gigabyte of memory and 200G of Seagate storage.
At some point around 2008 the site was transferred to a Solaris machine owned by Bignose and hosted in Toronto. After a year or so, that server was to be dismantled and the site was moved to a virtual machine running on a Dell PowerEdge rackmount server (operating out of Vic's basement). Both the guest and host are running Ubuntu 10.04.
Throughout its life, mvgrafx has run the following operating systems: various versions of Slackware Linux, Mandrake Linux, and Ubuntu.
