Linux at BuckoSoft

December 18, 1995

Welcome to sarah, our Internet server.
Sarah is a yucky old Intel Impaired 386/DX40 with 8 MBs RAM and 2GBs HD.

Hardly useful for anything that comes out of Redmond.

However, with the power of Linux, this obsolete little box has become our mail, FTP, www, and PPP dialin server. And it was free! (Compare to Microsoft BackOffice at $1999.)

Granted, this little box is slow, and swaps a lot. But it has been running for days (thats 29.0 years) and has never lost a packet, core dumped, or crashed! (knock knock) in a production environment.

Now, I'm pretty intimate with the inner workings of a PC and the 80386 and i never thought that anything this useful and powerful could come out of the network interface of a Steenky PeeCee.
(For reference, compare digital video with "the power of Pentium" versus, say, a 12 year old Amiga or even an 18 year old Atari 800!)

Flash! On May 8, 1998 after 505 days of faithful service, cary (my second Linux box) crashed!. I was so disappointed. I was shocked. Then i put it into perspective; that's about 470 days longer than i've ever kept one of my Windows 95 or NT boxes running.

These days (as of July 1998), my web server is run from duke, a dual Pentium Pro 200Mhz box. NT never ran so good on this box! duke is really really fast. Microsoft (and HP and other Unix vendors) should be very scared. Intel with Linux is an amazing Price/performance ratio.

Oh, sarah still handles mail and DNS. She's very happy. Her best uptime was 453 days, at which time she had to move to our new house. (I thought about keeping her up on the battery for the hour drive but decided it wasn't worth the hassle :)

By her uptime, sarah was measuring how long we've lived in our house. But on September 16, 1999, the day after Floyd came to town, our power was flickering enough to be really irritating. Finally at 14:00 EDT, it went out. Two hours later i had to power sarah down until 22:00 that night. So i have to remember to add 142 days to my Guilford longevity.

July 22, 2000	`sarah` upgraded from sendmail to qmail. Rebooted because i wanted to test rebooting :)
December 12, 2000	Another 14 hour power outage
March 24, 2001	Sarah needed a new power supply.
July 1, 2001	`sarah` is never going to see extreme uptimes in this house. The power goes out every four months and stays out for at least 8 hours when it does. The 1996 battery is only good for 2 hours. (The bigger problem though is today we came home to a house without power and were thus locked out of the house.)
March 26, 2004	`sarah` retired today still going strong. Final tally was 3037 days (8.3 years). Her duties had become redundant. `sean` is already handling mail for other domains, so why not buckosoft.com too. The final straw was that i had to stop using qmail, which has become a spammer's haven. (How many "returned mail" spams have you gotten?) So i guess the counter up top is, um, how long i've used Linux. :)
May 29, 2010	My oldest Linux box now is `katie` who is 26.0 years old, and has been a firewall for 20.5 years.