The Goldfish Chronicles

Back in 2001 I migrated from a P90 left under the desk at my former employer’s in the UK, to a 4U server hosted by Iglou.com. I later replaced the 4U with two off the shelf super-micro P3 1Ghz 1Us, a cheap ebay’d celeron 400mhz (dns server) 1U and a built from pieces and ebay P3 700mhz 1U. I upgraded one of the P3 1Ghz 1Us to a P4 2.xGhz super-micro later on.

I originally used SuSE on the machines, but having to visit them physically to do CD updates was a crap idea so I switched to stable-debian just before my son was born on two of the machines, openbsd on the DNS box (it was going to do firewall too) and freebsd on the P3 (osjava.org machine). Nothing but good to say about debian, openbsd and freebsd. No serious problems.

After moving to Seattle last year, it was obvious that my ability to admin the machines while they were in KY was going to be tricky. So I slowly moved services off of the 4 machines and onto other services (gmail.com, code.google.com and a GoDaddy virtual server) - and in the case of CheeseWorld, a very inactive MUD, it was turned off.

Last night I turned off the machines themselves and a friend picked them up from Iglou this morning. The end of a grand experiment and education - having servers online (great bandwidth, great price) is an addicting thing.

Updated: … but the time needed to manage them is not something I can spare now and the cost in Seattle is not ‘Great price’.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.