Smeg, taken from the British sitcom Red Dwarf, was an attempt by the writers to create a phonetically pleasing futuristic swear word. Problem being is that it resembles the word Smegma, Google it for its definition. Since starting this domain I have had many an experience, I was running my own router with a RedHat linux distro 2.4 kernel using iptables as a firewall and NAT, I didn't stop there either after getting this computer up an running I felt the need to install apache and sendmail. Having an unlimited ammount of email addresses was a pretty cool idea at the time and being able to host my on site without any annoying restrictions was okay too. Of course I had no web page design skills and my site looked like crap, I was more interested in the behind-the-scenes side of things like SQL databases and PHP, bear in mind this is around the year of 2004. I used to run a server for the game Armagedtron http://armagetronad.net/ which is a tron lightcycle clone. My server was pretty popular and had many frequent users, I called it armasmegtron, google it and see what you get. This game was the reason that a friend of mine picked the name of Pihinger for his World of Warcraft character. See he had satelite internet which are notoriously bad for online gaming especially if your dish is uni-directional. Your requests are send via dial-up over a LAN line and your data is sent with high speed to your dish, when playing a game which requires communication both ways your speed is only as fast as the slowest connection which is dial-up. With armagedtron the slowest connection is distributed to all players so that everyone is on a level playing field. So whenever Pihinger, which means High Pinger, joined with his monterous 1500 latency, everyone got pissed.
One day I got a phone call from my ISP talking about the increased traffic from my connection. I told them that I had no idea what they were talking about and that I just use the internet for email and ebay and the normal.
Them: "So you're not running any services like a web server or anything"
Me: "Err, No I just us it for browsing the web and emails"
Them: "Oh, because we see a site....... Smeg dot mine dot en you"
Me: "... Oh That!!"It was pretty obvious with the mention of that specific domain that they were looking at my site. I had to think fast here as I was obviously in breach of their TOS.
Me: "Is that shared out there on the internet? I had played with websites but I thought that was just private"Well all I can say is that they bought it. Never mind that I had an Invision Power Board installed on there with lots of posts from way too many people to live under one roof. Basically I was told to take that stuff down, which I did. In fact I just went out and got a regular router because now there is no reason to have all of that "power" when you can't use it.
Since then I have gone back to my old tricks and ran services and have VNC running on all of the computers in my house and servers just in case I need to get on any of the computers in my home from wherever I may be which has been handy to say the least. I remember one time where we were away from home and our city were to have a scheduled power outage for whatever reason and we were not going to make it home in time. So instead of letting all the computer which were on risk having errors from a sudden poweroff, I went to the nearest school for which I worked in and remoted in and shut down all of the computers.
Up until today I have run a minecraft server with a small following under the domain of smeg.mine.nu but now I have to say farewell to the good ol domain with the unique name that I tried to fit into everything.
ArmasmegtronYou will be missed.
Smegcraft
Invision Smeg Board etc.
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