DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve been hosting my own websites since 1996, using a parade of hardware:

• Power Mac 6100 (October, 1996)
• IBM PS/2 486
• homebuilt AMD tower (April, 2000)
• near-silent 1.13 GHz Tualatin desktop (December, 2001)
• 1U rackmount P4 (July, 2003)
• leased 1U #1 (January, 2006)
• leased 1U #2 (March, 2006)

Why would I change out the hardware every 16 months on average? Because traffic growth demands increasingly powerful servers just to cope with the crushing load of your frantic clickthroughs? Sadly, no.

Because deep down I’m an inveterate hardware hacker and I really enjoy researching the latest hardware and assembling servers out of component parts? Urgh, not.

No, the reason is this: computers suck ass.

Of the six retired servers, only three were still running when they were replaced: the Mac, the PS/2 (which served another 5+ years as my firewall, and even now needs only a $3 ISA ethernet card and it could be back in production; the thing simply won’t die), and the Tualatin machine, which is even more silent sitting unplugged in my closet.

The white-box AMD tower stopped recognizing its SCSI card, so I had to junk it. The 1U I bought for $1800 lost a disk drive, and then another, and I decided that I’m done with hardware maintenance, so I moved the sites to a leased server, the idea being that someone else would have to fix broken disk drives.

Except that this time, the drives didn’t break… they just changed files randomly every couple weeks, until Saturday, when they changed a bunch all at once, and Sunday, when the OS declared that the entire filesystem would henceforth be read-only. What the fsck is up with that?

The ISP gave me a fresh 1U server to migrate all my services to, but this is scarcely an improvement over doing hardware maintenance. Who wants to spend a day recovering from backups and rebuilding server applications and testing? I think I don’t need a leased server so much as a managed one.