Bananas - bananahome.com

In the beginning there was AS/400...

My friend Fredrik and I set up our first website in 1998, when we registered the domain pyttemjuk.nu. We wanted to use an AS/400 as that was what we primarily worked with back then. We used the internet connection of the company we worked for, and set it up for ourselves and our friends, with SMTP/POP3 mail and web space. The only drawback of using the company's internet connection was that it was 250 km from Gothenburg where we lived, but it was managable. After a couple of years (and a couple of AS/400 machines) we had to conclude that the AS/400 machines that we could get couldn't handle any form of SMTP anti-relay measures that started to become very much needed around this time. We ended up on several DNS Black Lists. There was never a question about buying a newer one that could do what we needed, since our budget demanded that we get whatever machine we could for free.

The only viable alternative for us was Domino. As Fredrik was mainly a power user of Domino, I had most of the responsibility for setting it up. As we wanted to try and avoid using Windows, we started with Linux and Domino on a simple PC. It all worked beautifully, at first, until Linux for some reason shut down all of the services that provided access from the outside, like Telnet and FTP. Domino however, continued to work without any problems at all, but with the total lack of control over the OS we needed another solution.

Around this time Fredrik moved on to a new employer, that happened to have an internet connection in Gothenburg, so we took the chance to move our little server there instead. We brought it home and started to work on getting back into Linux. We almost failed, since we couldn't get either Telnet or FTP up again, and the only way to access the Domino data directory was to set up Samba to access it via Windows Network. I don't know what happened to that Linux installation, if it had been hacked or if we had just misconfigured something. Probably the latter. We honestly didn't know enough about Linux to be able to run it effectively and securely.

So we retreated back to what we knew: Windows. We set up a Windows server, and installed Domino on it. Put the data directory back and got it up and running without any trouble at all. So we continued to provide web space and mail services for our friends and family.

When Fredrik's employer decided to close down the internet connection in Gothenburg, we had to go with another solution, which I'll talk more about another day.