When I first came living on the Beneluxlaan, internet was a rare and scarce medium that only a designated group of people had. When finding out who owned the connection, a guy on the 6th floor, he was willing to give me a connection.
We were using the connection with about 20 people, and people certainly knew how to upload stuff through their KazAa’s and Bittorrents, making the connection utterly slow. Since I’m a systems administrator, this bugged me and I was looking for a way to improve the speed.
That’s when I installed a Linux firewall distro on an old Pentium 3 computer which I had supplied with 2 network cards. One network card for the internal network, and one to the internet. After having some problems in the beginning and stability issues, I installed a new Linux distro named IPCop. This one runned great and smooth and was also helpful in showing which people polluted the network by uploading data all day. After asking them kindly for a couple of times, I though it was time for greater measures, since the popularity of the conneciton had grown to about 30 people, on one DSL-connection! Through some more restrictive bandwidth settings I was able to keep the speed of the connection good at all times.
By that time, Tim was building and expanding his network and he was growing more rapidly because he had the time to professionalize his network. I had to work during the day, so managing the internet was only a secondary thing to me.
When I moved out, Tim connected his network to mine and by doing so, providing people with an internet connection without any downtime.
I’ve always had much fun when configuring the network with Tim, and getting to know people fast when connecting them to the internet. It was a great time at Beneluxlaan.