Nostalgia – FreeBSD

Stumbled upon this via The Wayback Machine last week.

rakheshnet

Sigh. Rakhesh Sasidharan – FreeBSD administrator. Good ol’ days! :)

Sadly this front page and one or two others are all that The Wayback Machine archived of this site. And I don’t have a backup of the site either as I clumsily lost it (I have a habit of being excellent at taking backups but also somehow managing to delete/ misplace those backups just when I need them).

The site was a wiki running DokuWiki atop Nginx and FreeBSD from a desktop PC at home. DNS was via TinyDNS and some script that would update the A records whenever my ADSL dynamic IP would change. I had three FreeBSD machines at home, they were called Asterix, Obelix, and Dogmatix. Apart from this wiki the machines also hosted an IMAP server (Courier IMAP, I think) for my emails and Postfix for sending emails. It had some more bits and pieces but I don’t recollect them now. The wiki itself was mostly about FreeBSD administration. I love (loved?) FreeBSD – I have always been more partial to the *BSD Operating Systems than Linux, maybe because they felt like an underdog but also because these OSes felt more coherent than the hotchpotch that is Linux.

Anyways, all those are days of the past now … but it was a good trip down memory lane to see that wiki pop up when I least expected it!

Here’s a photo of Asterix, Obelix, and Dogmatix at my parents’ house:

DSC01205

It’s sad that I don’t even have a good picture of them! Here’s a photo of the three machines after I moved out of my parents’ house:

DSC00047

In both pics Asterix, Obelix, and Dogmatix are the two black Compaq and one white IBM machines. The fourth machine was a regular Windows XP desktop.

The second pic’s from Dec 2007. I think these three machines stayed on for one more year; sometime between 2008 and 2009 I decided to stop spending so much time at home on FreeBSD and shut them down.

After that I had a FreeBSD VPS and also some FreeBSD VMs at home, but I didn’t do as much with them as I did with the three physical machines.