So long, faithful server.

[brooksmoses]

Some bits of sysadmin-foo need commemorating....

So, about a week over ten years ago, in mid-February 2004, a few friends of mine and friends of theirs bought a new little Compaq Pentium-3 server, named it "jinx", installed FreeBSD on it, and set it up in a co-op colo in San Francisco. Later that year, I also got an account on the server, and set up my "dpdx.net" domain and email address there.

In December 2006, when the little mush that lilairen and keshwyn and annwyd and others of us lived on disappeared in someone else's server move, I set up a replacement little mush on jinx. It wasn't much of a mush -- 90-odd objects all totaled including rooms and players -- but it was a community that saw us through hard times and good times and quite a lot of life.

Ten years on, and jinx has been through a couple of datacenter moves and a couple of co-op reorganizations, and a regrettable lack of operating-system upgrades. The friendships with the friends that initially set it up seem to have mostly drifted apart, mostly amicably (I had one hard breakup, perhaps now healed though distant enough that it's hard to say), and I think I ended up with the server because I was the only one really using it. But there comes a time when, no matter how stable a ten-year-old system seems to be, and how reliably the pair of 80MB disks keep spinning (28 billion revolutions so far, or thereabouts), that the need to replace it becomes too hard to ignore.

And so I have set up a new server, in a co-op colo in Minneapolis, and transferred over my domain and email server and the little mush, and they're now running on the new server as if not much has changed. This weekend, I'll go by the colo here to pick up jinx, so this evening was time to shut it down.

So, for posterity, the last session log.

brooks@jinx.dpdx.net's password: 
Last login: Fri Feb 21 19:51:56 2014 from 50-0-150-25.ded
Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE (MYKERNEL) #0: Thu Feb 12 11:18:11 PST 2004
Welcome to jinx!
jinx:~> uname -a
FreeBSD jinx 4.9-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE #0: Thu Feb 12 11:18:11 PST 2004
root@nameme:/usr/src/sys/compile/MYKERNEL  i386
jinx:~> date && uptime
Fri Feb 21 20:26:20 PST 2014
 8:26PM  up 601 days,  4:46, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
jinx:~> gcc --version
2.95.4
jinx:~> ./houseboat/tinymush-3.1p4/game/Startmush stop
'mush.config' not found.
jinx:~> (cd houseboat/tinymush-3.1p4/game/ && ./Startmush stop)
The MUSH is shutting down.
Shutdown completed.
jinx:~> echo 'And so, it is done.  Goodnight; farewell.'
And so, it is done.  Goodnight; farewell.
jinx:~> sudo shutdown -h now
Password:
Shutdown NOW!
shutdown: [pid 49666]
jinx:~>                                                                                
*** FINAL System shutdown message from brooks@jinx ***                       
System going down IMMEDIATELY                                                  
                                                                               
                                                                               
System shutdown time has arrived

Goodnight, little server. And thank you.

Comments

[wordweaverlynn]

Good night, sweet jinx. May flights of modules ping thee to thy rest.

[keshwyn]

*groan*
*applause*

[suzanne.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I understand. My sundell.net e-mail address is aliased to my personal gmail one because dammit, that's been my e-mail address since 1999, and I'm not letting go. The server has gone from living in Sundell's closet to a colo somewhere in Texas, I think, but so long as it's still around, I'm going to keep using it.

All hail the faithful little server!