About the Halibut

The Halibut systems exist to bring together a diverse, interesting set of people and give them a secure, private system to experiment with and use.

The halibut systems principally host:

and many domains associated with users of these three systems.

The halibut systems offer a variety of services to its user base:

Every day, these machines deal with (on average) the following traffic levels:

We offer a wide variety of services to a widely distributed user community. This complicates security of the system somewhat. Despite this complication, we have endeavored to provide our user base with a system that has good security and stability characteristics. We have succeeded, for the most part. We have had several known security incidents, but they were all restricted to single compromised user accounts. In all known cases, the reason for the compromise was poor user password hygiene, which is somewhat out of the control of the site administrators. There have been no known root compromises, nor have there been any instances where a compromise of one user account has lead to a compromise of another user account.

This is not due to lack of trying, however. We get anywhere from 0-50 attacks weekly from all manner of attacker. The average is about 10 per week. Some are dedicated attackers who try numerous attacks. Others are obviously automated vulnerability scanners.

Our system's robustness tends to be quite good. All failures up to this point have been due to hardware failure. Some of the most recent hardware has been particularly troublesome.

These systems have been assembled and supported principally through the efforts of two people: Mark Smith (the machines' owner) and Joshua Hill (the machines' principal administrator). Both of these people have supported these systems as a hobby. Mark and Josh have put several hundred hours of work into these systems. In addition, Mark has invested several thousand dollars into these systems in the way of hardware. Co-location fees are currently payed by Mark Smith.