As an example of the competence behind this firewall is: programmer, designer, network admin, technician, security engineer, DTP and even one illustration major.

The mainframe of this net has been ripped up and rebuilt for years and has never reached this potentional until very recently when we got our hands on a couple of real routers. The idea behind this net was first born somewhat around October 1996 and was mostly constructed for pure amusement, such as playing the good old Command & Conquer.

At this time there was only two connected computers, but more was soon to come. Within a couple of months, three more computers were connected and that was the time when this idea started to get more and more interesting and got more and more publishing. The neighbors started to wonder what the heck we were doing climbing around in the middle of the nights with cables and connectors. Thanks to the good (?!?) publishing we now had a few more computers to connect and we started constructing a high speed backbone due to certain distances caused by some trouble connecting wires the shortest way.

The first server to see the dawn of the net around christmas 1996 was a Novell Netware 3.12 fileserver housing the users homedirectories and one inkjet printer. This server is no longer with us (may our good server, Heaven, rest in peace). Later on this server was exchanged to a Netware 4.10 server doing the same thing, but with faster CPU and plenty of harddisk space. This server also served as our first router.

Almost simultaneously we felt that we needed some kind of gateway to the Internet, so we constructed a new server. This server was mostly born from scratchparts that we found everywhere (might explain the very suspicious problems we had) and voila, we had an Windows NT4 Server to play with. The first application to be installed was Wingate and a connection to the Internet was made through this server and one 56K0 modem.

To be honest with you, this Wingate solution sucked big times. A part from the fact that the server crashed about 10-15 times during 24 hours the loss of bandwidth, due to the technology on which Wingate was designed, was enormous. This idea was the worst ever and considered a real disaster. Even though we knew the problems, we kept on using this link since it really delivered Internet to the whole network through one single modem.

Some of us got more and more interested in housing an own webserver and to maintain a site. I was contacted and asked if I could take care of this and the responce was: "Consider it done". Ten to fifteen minutes later there was a webserver on the network running IIS. This webserver was located on our Wingate machine since we wanted to use our programmingskills to create and show our own, 100% maintained, guestbook made in CGI.

This guestbook gave us alot of publishing and a great deal of visitors as well. Visitors from all over the world, Israel, United Kingdom, Denmark, USA, Phillipines, Germany, Poland and a few more countries.

The spring of 1998 I finally saw the light. The winter of 1997 gave me plenty of time to solve the Wingate solution/problem and I was exploring a (for me) completely new OS called Linux. I trusted Linux to bring our network to new dimensions due to the fact that we could use a more transparent and easily maintained gateway combined with a superb firewall. This server is still running as the master gateway and firewall. Naturally, this machine has been upgraded with both software and hardware, but it´s still the same good old machine, a miditower P90 with 16 Mb RAM and 15.2 Gb harddisk storage.

Now the network consists of several servers, Linux, Windows NT, Novell Netware, Solaris and there are less or virtually none administration due to the Zero Effort Networking applications written by our main programmer. The system is fully operational and automatically.

Due to unbalanced workload, the original network was redesigned and cut into several subnets connected through routers. The net now consists of a class B network divided into six subnets allowing 8190 hosts on each of the subnets. The network has recently become an InterLan due to the use of routers connecting the BaseNet with other nets through several VPN lines. Inside the InterLan the coexistance of five IP domains is reality and besides this domain, "millhill.org" there´s another one called "hillnet.nu".

We feel that we are pioneers within this area of home networking and want to spread the word to others around us to maybe start developing their own network.