Server neuron-ai.tuke.sk (neuron) is up from the year 1995 (I think so). This time was formed AI lab at TU Košice under name "LUI" (Laboratórium umelej inteligencie), what means "AI Lab" in slovak. It was Intel Pentium based PC with some SCSI harddisks. Laboratory was starting also with few PCs, WYSE X-terminal and HP Laserjet printer. We used Linux as operating system for neuron from the start. This time it was Slackware with kernel maybe 1.2.13. Neuron was always used as mail server, web and ftp server. It was also always stressed by experiments with ANN simulations and with to many netscapes running. From start it was also our file server, and as time continues NFS became one of main stressing factors too. We started with few tens of users, now we have over 300 users (over one half of them active).

Hardware was upgraded continuously, with maybe three or four main upgrades to bigger MHz values and finally to 2 CPUs. As the life goes, number of workstations and terminals grows (typically). We decided to use NFS to help with maintenance of this, and now from software point of view, neuron is someway distributed to other machines in lab. I think the level of this distribution will continue to grow.

We started with Slackware and for few years it was continuously upgraded, package by package. It started to be heavy customized environment. Main characteristics was also liberal "politics" of administration and this was main reason to security problems and step back: restrictions and OS reinstalation. We choosed Debian as only option of this time and space (where space is our lab). This was start of steppish reinstalation of OS as new versions of Debian becomes and old ones get obsolete. As you see, this is usual boring practice of the masses. Now we run third (maybe fourth) version of Debian on neuron. One of reinstalations was forced by crackers. This is a strange history. Nearly half of servers on our university was compromised and "destroyed" by crackers through weekend. It was some kind of shutdown of university, crackers did real work with even using "rm" command. Some servers never get recovered from this event. Neuron was down too.

In summer 2004 the old two-processor neuron was replaced with a new 64 bit system (the NEWRON). It is based on 2 pieces of AMD Opteron 244 processors, 1 GB RAM and a lot of disk space (approximately 600GB). Nowdays, we are running a highly customized Slackware 10.1 distribution, with optimalization for the 64 bit architecture.