A Tour of Panix Through a Pinhole

The Front Office

(33KB)

This is a view of the front office at Panix (the ISP that I used to sys admin for). The camera is setup near Liz's desk pointing towards the front entrance. The recent rebuild of the office has completely changed this section of the office.

(33KB) 06:45 on Polaroid Type 83 film

This view is from the other end of the office pointing back towards where the camera was setup in the previous picture. For the most part the technical staff sat on the left, and the user support staff sat on the right. My desk was second from the back. That's Ed (our Director of Physical Plant) getting up from his chair in the back, and Kathryn busily answering the phone up front.

(31KB) 06:45 on Polaroid Type 83 film

This was my desk in the front office. You can tell I'm a computer person. I have an awful time finding horizontal desk space.

The Machine Room

(60KB)

This is a view of the machine room before we moved out to the front office. My desk is the one in the middle. Although this image predates all the others, you should use this image to orient yourself when looking at the other machine room images.

Note that this image was taken with a rented Wisner Tradional 4x5 camera and a 90mm lens. I don't recall the film or exposure.

(39KB) 06:45 on Polaroid Type 83 film

This is the NYNEX phone equipment. This equipment is near the door and to the left of the modem racks. On the left is a Serial Line Carrier (a SLC-5). Each line card controls two lines. There are 24 lines per T1, two T1's per row, 2 rows (or 4 T1's) per shelf, and four shelves (or 16 T1's) per rack. To the left of the picture frame is an empty full height rack waiting for another SLC-5 to be installed. Each light represents a phone line in use. Below the SLC-5 is it's battery backup. To the right is the fiber mux (the light tan box). Above the fiber mux is the T1 hand off panel. Below it is the fiber battery backup. On the far wall are the smart jacks for our data T1's, the patch panel for the phone lines, our PBX and the voice mail system. Much of this has also been changed during the office rebuild.

(43KB) 08:45 on Polaroid Type 83 film

These are the modem racks in the machine room. In the foreground is a temporary table that was used before we populated the new rack on the right. The rack on the left holds the low speed and 14.4Kbps modems. The middle racks hold the v.34 modems, and the rack in the background holds the Panix user machines.

(38KB) 08:45 on Polaroid Type 83 film

This rack holds the Panix machines. The top shelf has a router for a Panix associate. The next shelf holds the old news machine (which is currently used for UUCP and DNS) and the development machine. panix.com is the machine to the left of the terminal screen on the middle rack. Below that are panix2.panix.com and panix3.panix.com. The bottom shelf has anansi.panix.com, the screen for the PC based servers and the kerberos server. The rack to the right has the new news machine and its disks.

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