Final shutdown of my historical server

Thursday 20 December, 2007, 03:00 GMT+1 :

indiana:/# halt -n -f -p

This is the final shutdown of my «historical server» , indiana.

In 2001, when I was still a student, I’ve had the opportunity to put my own machine at a small local ISP near Bordeaux (France) named Atlantic Line. The machine was already set and running at home for a year for homework. One year later, this ISP was merged into a bigger local ISP : Alienor. My server moved to Alienor with all the other machines without any kind of requirement from the ISP, which I appreciated much. Some time ago, I was the sysadmin for the French LUG ABUL which was hosted by Atlantic Line and is hosted by Alienor for a couple of years by now. This justified my own server. As long as I have quit this LUG for a while, it made sense it was time to have my server removed.

Thank you very much, Alienor and the ABUL, for having let me have my first own server on the Internet for these years.

This machine let me discover Debian GNU/Linux and has been through many releases :

• 2000 : a mix of Potato as stable + Woody as testing,
• 2001 : Woody as stable,
• 2004 : Sarge as stable,
• 2007 : Etch as stable.

All apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade were operated remotely (from Japan for the upgrade to Woody !) without a hitch, only minor problems. It has run Apache, OpenLDAP, Cyrus+Postfix+Amavis+SpamAssassin+Clamav, MySQL, Nagios, Cacti, OpenVPN ... and obviously GNU/Linux.

Since its beginning, I’ve had to change the hardware once in 2005 but the running system was strictly duplicated (tar c|tar x), so for me, it was a seven year old system that I have shutdown tonight.

By the way, the hardware was failing for a few days (some block disk errors with SMART and CPU/MB temperature peaks - some fan issue ? - were monitored). It was really the time to end it.

For those who may think «hey guy, seven years does not make it historical», I tell you : it is, to me. It corresponds to a period where we started the battle against software patents in Europe, where the first Libre Software Meeting sessions were organized, where I personally discovered the Free Software state of mind, not just the technical aspect (my first Linux experience was in 1996). It does matter to me.

And for those wondering why I’ve done a halt -n -f -p, the reason is : a couple of dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hd? just before, still remotely. You guess ?