OCAU Server Hardware

In The Beginning.. OCAU ran on Agg's webspace at ZipWorld (now part of Pacific Internet).

But that didn't last long, and we moved to an "unlimited" hosting plan with an American provider, that turned out to be "unlimited" in the way that, say, fossil fuels are. So Agg rapidly built a dedicated server from his desktop machine, which became Odin and was hosted at Zip's datacentre for about 18 months.

After that we moved to being hosted by AusGamers - in that they provide the rack space and bandwidth, but we provide our own hardware. To that end Agg built Thor, which lasted for about 18 months or so. The last 6 months were kinda painful, though.

As we grew, we needed more server grunt. So, the hosting was split between Pie, the database server, kindly provided by Plus Corporation, and Chips, the webserver. For info on that upgrade, see this article.

We outgrew those servers eventually too, so now we're hosted on a dual Opteron machine called bbq, which was largely provided by PlusCorp and hosts the forums. The rest of the site runs on beer, a dual Xeon machine. As with pie and chips, bbq and beer talk directly to each other via a private gigabit ethernet crossover. This carries database traffic etc. They both also talk directly to the internet.