Currently yip.org is sitting in a closet at 263 Adelaide St. W. in Toronto on it.ca's network. I'm not sure, but I think it's got a 2Mb connection to reptiles.org, which peers with, among other things, UUNet and TorIX.
yip.org's Acceptable Use Policy is as follows: Usage of yip.org is a privilege, not a right, especially since access is free. The administration of yip.org reserves the right to do anything to anyone's account without prior notice or justification.
Now that that's been clarified, here are the guidelines for using yip.org:
Aside from what's above, feel free to do whatever you like on yip.org. The administration of yip.org handles abuses on a complaint basis - if we receive a complaint about something, whether it's IRC behaviour, a webpage hosted here, or the shape of ovals, we'll investigate and take what we deem to be appropriate action. The exceptions to this rule involve the security of the server and attempts at using yip.org as a spam relay - we take a proactive stance then.
If you'd like to report abuses of yip.org, please send mail to abuse at yip dot org with the details.
The administration of yip.org does not give out details concerning its users or their accounts to anyone, period. However, we cannot guarantee the security of the server, despite our best efforts. Note that all users can see many details of other user's accounts - things such as the contents of one's public_html directories, when one has logged in and from where, the last time one checked one's mail, and other information. Also note that if presented with a court order, we will most likely comply with it.
Consequently, we recommend that any information one would not want available to the entire world should not be stored on yip.org.
In a nutshell: yip.org started off as a 486DX2/66 with 24 megs of RAM hanging off a 128k ISDN connection in late 1996. At the time, it was running OS/2 v4 and had a 1gig hard drive. It was later upgraded to an AMD 486DX4/100. Mid-1997, it was mostly replaced with the system described at the top, only it was running FreeBSD 2.2.5-STABLE. I wasn't a very good sysadmin back then and yip.org was hacked in early 1998 and used to attack someone else. Luckily, the backups worked, and the system was upgraded to FreeBSD 3.0-STABLE; the 2GB hard drive was added and the 1gig was relegated to scratch space for upgrades and such. A few months later, I attempted to add a 2nd processor to the motherboard, which ended in disaster as I repeatedly lost filesystems. A while after that, the connection to the outside world was upgraded to a 1Mb DSL line, which was quite nice. This was all fine and dandy until I decided to leave ACC/AT&T and move to Montreal. Thus, yip.org was moved to its current location described in the Network section in the summer of 1999 where it has remained since - official ownership was given to Sean Lerner, who is also the Keeper of the Domain. Administration duties are split between me and him.
At some point it would be excellent to replace the motherboard and controller with ones that actually work well. The hard drives are an accident just waiting to happen, although the 2GB one does have a case fan attached to heatsinks sitting on top of it. Web-based mail retrieval was installed just recently, but the current system just doesn't have the horsepower to be able to do it effectively.