Holy crap, deadsquid.com is over six years old! Funny, but for some reason, it feels like 12.
Cthulu – which is deadsquid.com – started off as an SGI Challenge S (it’s still around) with a 2GB drive and 256MB of memory running IRIX 5.3. It made it’s debut in Ottawa on Bell Canada’s first ADSL offering, which offered a static IP, 2Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up, all for $64.95CAD/month. That was in 1997, before Bell realized how much they could charge for such a service. They still haven’t figured it out.
Deadsquid.com was used as an Expert CTF Quake 2 server (I had to custom build the mods for IRIX – blecch), a webserver, a mail server using Netscape Messaging Server, and a mailing list for a bunch of us who used to work at Ingenia and needed a place to vent. Over the years the memory and disk was upgraded with 3rd party gear and the OS upgraded to IRIX 6.2 and then to 6.5. The cthulu hostname, webserver, and Expert CTF servers were moved to a Compaq 1850 running RedHat Linux 7.1 when I moved to NYC to take a job at Globix. The Challenge S was renamed “mail”, and resided in my apartment in New York and continued to run as deadsquid’s mail server until September 11th, 2001.
The apartment was rather close to the World Trade Center, so power and access to it was lost for about two weeks (although it did stay on until about 8pm on 9/11). Within a couple hours of the power going out, the mail server was migrated to the Compaq box, and deadsquid.com has been hosted there ever since.
The box is a dual P3-500 Compaq 1850 with 768MB of RAM, 2 x 9.1GB drives, and 3 x 18.2GB drives. Today it runs RedHat Linux 7.3, and I am really pissed off that RedHat discontinued supporting it. I paid for the software support, and refuse to shell out the ridiculous amounts of money they want for the Enterprise edition. It’s getting old, too, so it’ll be upgraded this summer. That said, it’s a solid performer, and has served us well.
deadsquid currently hosts around 150 mail accounts for folks I know and like, around 20 mailing lists, and 20-odd websites. It’s nice to see it’s used, and has been a pretty fun hobby.
I’m in the process of upgrading the mail system this weekend to postfix with an LDAP backend, and it’s a pain. The ancient Netscape software must be replaced though, so it’s a good way to spend a grey, wet, and chilly weekend.
Today’s run was a good one. We ran close to 15k (I thought it was 16, but was off by a wee bit :), and went through a good chunk of Ottawa’s more scenic parks and areas. We discovered the “Canada Pavillion” and, not being able to figure out what it was by looking at it, am glad that Accenture paid for a good chunk of the $2.6M the thing cost. What a fucking waste of space. In any event, good run, good pace, and a sub 1:40 time in the half seems possible now.
