Hazmat: The full story.

Way back in 1992 I was chief engineer at a college radio station. This was some time after I had graduated from that university, I just liked hanging around the place. The students there knew nothing about any technical issues, so they didn't mind me being CE until a student came along. In the same building there was an amateur radio station that was also affiliated with the University and I occasionally hung out over there. There was another radio-dweeb, like me, who also spent time at both stations, Chris. He set up a computer over at this station that was running a new operating system, Linux, a free variant of Unix that ran on a 386. At the time I felt like it was no big deal. Little would I know at the time how much it would change my life.

I never actually had a legitimate account of my own at that university. This was just before the advent of the world- wide-web, which quickly became synonymous with the whole Internet. I had graduated in 1991, and up until then, my only contact with official computers was an old Unisys machine that was a new experience in pain every time I tried to use it. I just fiddled around with PCs and Macs, did my word processing, and a little bit of BBSing. After I graduated, a friend of mine had an account on one of the big Unix machines on campus, and he didn't mind if I used it. At this point I discovered the fun of Usenet, and its ability to suck vast amounts of free time. The campus had a modem pool connected to an Annex server that anyone could dial into, so all I needed was a computer and a modem. I didn't have a girlfriend, so I had plenty of free time. After a while I wanted to get my own email address. Chris offered me one on the amateur station's computer, and I was in business. Not only was this my own email address, it was a heck of a lot faster than the overloaded campus-run machine, and I could telnet to it from the Annex server.

At this point I was rapidly becoming one of the converted. While obtuse, Unix let me do what I wanted with little glitz, but quickly and easily. After a while, I thought this isn't so tough, I can do it myself. Early in 1993, went out to a computer show, bought a 386-40 motherboard, floppy and case, scrounged up 8 megs of RAM, Ethernet card, hard drive, Hercules monitor, and a stack of floppies- the original Slackware Linux. I assembled it all on my kitchen table. It took some effort to get it right, but it was running within a few days, and I had a Linux machine, v 0.99pl14. On a cold night, I brought it up to the Radio Station, ran a piece of RG-58 from the station Ethernet bridge, and I was networked.

This was major cool. I had a machine that I could dial into for free, I controlled the server, I could read email and Usenet as much as I wanted. The people that donated parts to the construction of the computer also got accounts, since a number of them were in the same boat I was (no legitimate University account). Chris was giving away lots of accounts over on the Amateur station's computer- and it was showing, the computer had really slowed down. I figured I wanted to keep the computer's response rate up, so I was picky about who I gave accounts to- I had to know them pretty well, or someone I really trusted had to vouch for them. I don't think there was ever more than about 20 active accounts on the machine, and never more than about ten regular users.

A little while after I started the machine, a guy I knew in passing, who also was a Matt B. asked me to set up a mailing list for him. He had a list of people that he would forward political rants, humor, and party announcements to, and he wanted to automate it, and give it a life of its own. I agreed to do this, but I would take over the day to day running of it. The SPACENET mailing list was born. I set up a "SmartList" based mailing list, which had archival retrieval, auto unsubscription, a real mailing list like the big boys ran.

Around the time I started running this computer, I started hearing about this new thing- the World Wide Web. BFD. Something people could see pretty pictures on and text on. Who would want that? Telnet was good enough for me. I guess I'm not that good at predicting technology trends.

After I had set up SPACENET, I had started to play with the web on my computer at work, an OS/2 machine, and I was starting to see the usefulness of the web. I thought, why not set up an archive that people could get to with a browser, and get around the convoluted email interface to the archive (which no-one was using anyway). So, I started running the NCSA http daemon. I heard about how wonderful the CERN http daemon was, so I switched over to it, and after a while I switched over to Apache (I have no idea of the timeline). In the meantime I started playing with Perl and CGI.

Everything was running pretty well, no major problems until June 1995. The connection kept going up and down, and I couldn't explain why. I thought that maybe there were conflicts on the IP address, the cable was flaky, or maybe the Ethernet card was bad. I switched the cable and the card, and that didn't really change a thing. I never really had an official IP address assigned- so after much debate (in my head), I decided to change IP address to another assigned to the building that was not being used. This was painful since I had to tell everyone I knew about the change, and have every one who used the machine do the same. Well, I changed it, and it seemed to correct the problem.

In July of 1995, I was at a housewarming party/barbecue for a friend, Bill. I was sitting outside on the grass talking with Yermo. The Internet was really catching on at the time- Yermo had just started an ISP, and he was really psyched on the concept. We talked about the mess that the whole IP change debacle was, and Yermo suggested that we set up a new domain- they were free (at that time), and since he already had the nameservers set up, it wouldn't be a problem. I had been kicking around with the nickname "hazmat" for a while- I thought it was a cool play on my name. We decided to try and get hazmat.net, since we thought it fit in with the concept of the network of friends that this machine connected. Yermo tried to register the .net- no go. We had to prove that we were a network infrastructure provider, but the .com didn't have that restriction. So, on July 27th, 1995, hazmat.com was born. Now that we controlled our nameserver, we could move the computer to any IP address we wanted to (and was routed to us).

While all of this was happening, another fiend of mine, Duncan, saw how well this set-up was working, so he installed his own Linux server on the campus. This computer was a bit more legitimate. It was affiliated with a genuine campus organization, and most important, the IP address was actually assigned, not squatted on, like hazmat's was. The campus Unix computers were still overloaded, so many students liked having accounts on anything else. While this little workhorse chugged along, we decided to add one more job- it would become the primary nameserver for the hazmat.com domain. Since it had the stability of an actual assigned address, the location of the nameserver could be considered reliable, unlike the IP address of hazmat.com.

The IP address agility afforded by us controlling our own nameserver proved quite useful. The winter of 1996 was a particularly bad one, with a few nasty storms. During these storms, I had the good fortune to be far, far away in warm, sunny Arizona. I checked my email often, and I got a rather disturbing email from the legitimate owner of the IP address we had been squatting upon. He was having some problems, and decided to telnet over to that IP address- lo and behold, he found hazmat (though it never announced itself as hazmat, only as the host name that was officially assigned to the IP address). This email was not confrontational at all, but he did want to meet with me. A bit panicked, I replied and said I couldn't make it. It was the winter break, and it was not completely unusual that someone affiliated with a University would be out of town. When I made it back to town, I did meet with the man and his sysadmin flunky, talked about Linux, I apologized profusely, and offered him help in setting up his own Linux server. He was very nice about it, and as long as I vacated his IP address, everything would be all right. By the time I actually had met with the man, I had changed IP addresses to the 3rd in the history of hazmat. This time I talked to the guy who was doing system administration for the radio station's own computer (Linux based, of course), and he said I could use an IP address that was actually assigned to the station.

There were other problems too- a hacker exploited a security hole in the radio station's computer. They then used that computer as a springboard into hazmat. I never was quite sure what caused that, but that inspired me to install tcp- wrappers and severely restrict the computers permitted to telnet into hazmat. There was also the named problem that surfaced in the spring of 1998. Someone kept crashing named on Duncan's computer (hazmat's primary nameserver). Duncan was away at the time, so it was up to me to fix it (if I wanted to receive any email, that is).

In 1996, I met Erika, who I married in 1997, and in June 1998, we decided to move to Austin, Texas. Since I would now be away from the station, there would be no way I could do the periodic maintenance that was necessary (reboots and upgrades) and that required access to the Console. I then decided that I would move the computer to a virtual domain on one of Yermo's computers, but with only a very small subset of the users (Erika and I).

While I was in the process of migrating to the new computer, the new Chief Engineer of the radio station (I'll just call him Dickwad) decided that he needed to see what was on the computer. He booted the console off a root disk, and added a few logins of his own, including an account with root privileges. This really torqued me off- as soon as I saw this, I eliminated the accounts, and kicked myself for not securing the console. Up to this point, the Chief Engineers at the station had a good bit of sense, and didn't screw with too much until they understood what they were actually doing. The extreme rapidity that Dickwad started ripping things out and moving things around just convinced me that it was time to leave that place. I had offered the Chief Engineers accounts, but this guy would want the root account to sniff around whenever he wanted. This just reinforced my decision to move out. It had been a great scam, but the time was up, and it was time to get out.

So it came to be, on October 17th, 1998 at 16:59:21 Eastern daylight time, hazmat.com as a rogue Internet domain, was no more. The hardware still exists, still running Linux, now a bit more mundane as a file server on my home network. I still have the original 386/40, too. It is sitting somewhere in a box, maybe someday it will be ressurected, running Linux.

Respectfully submitted for your perusal,
Matt Bennett

This page was last modified 216 weeks ago, on Wed Aug 18 2004.