What fol­lows is writ­ten far less well than it deserves, but — iron­i­cally — I’m drown­ing in other work at present. This needed writ­ing sooner than other things did.

Michael’s pulling the plug on the server that this web­site has run on since 2003.

The ‘server’ has changed dra­mat­i­cally in con­sti­tu­tion since it all began way back when, but… wow. An aston­ish­ingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Inter­net had alto­gether ceased to exist every­time Dale’s con­nec­tion went out. In the early days, we were all run­ning servers on port 1200 to cir­cum­vent ISP restric­tions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, run­ning Apache — on a pirated copy of Win­dows 2000 (those were the days in which “legit­mate soft­ware” con­sti­tuted an oxy­moron). Oper­at­ing on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoti­cons were hosted on free web space pro­vided by iiNet in order to con­serve band­width. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incred­i­ble. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future read­ers: that’s what hap­pens when the inter­net goes out for a cou­ple of hours, none of this occa­sional con­nec­tion time-out rub­bish), an irate explana­tory post from mwd­meyer would emerge and life would con­tinue as nor­mal. Until par­ents dis­cov­ered the server run­ning and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to con­ceal yet another com­puter in a room crowded full of equip­ment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.

These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones pow­er­ing Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recy­cling hard­ware, a sub­scrip­tion to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky mag­a­zines than any­one I know – I think it was that strange meet­ing place of compters, cre­ativ­ity, and cant that I later became com­fort­able with), when GeForce 2’s and Pen­tium 4’s (the first ones with RDRAM that every­one despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redi­rects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?

Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for per­sonal pub­lish­ing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic web­site was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web soft­ware in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birth­day. Twelve US dol­lars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redi­rects — sta­tic IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was out­side of the expe­ri­ence of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the priv­i­lege: sta­tic IPs being avail­able only on busi­ness grade inter­net connections.

These are mere details. The forums them­selves con­sti­tute an amaz­ing chron­i­cle of the lives of mwd­meyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n|cktangents, angelicde­ity, baibai, Sphinx^, lud­vikas, and a hand­ful of oth­ers over a fairly tumul­tuous time. There is so much not recorded explic­itly that sur­rounds the nearly 16,000 mes­sages from these eleven users alone. Some has been sup­pressed, other parts for­got­ten, but all of it inex­tri­ca­bly linked together in the momen­tum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.

The forums didn’t sur­vive post-school. This shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given rela­tion­ships faced with that man­ner of tran­si­tion, but it was still bizarre wit­ness­ing what would have been sev­eral months of time spent on a sin­gle web­site evap­o­rate into (not much). The server moved from Bal­main to Mar­ian Street, even­tu­ally find­ing its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recog­nise mutual busy-ness had a role such that nei­ther of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blame­less “but things changed” is ever suf­fi­cient when talk­ing about close rela­tion­ships. I’m fairly cer­tain my clos­est friend for about two years at school is some­one that I no longer have any­thing to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of fail­ing to keep work­ing on rela­tion­ships myself.

I sup­pose the point of all this is that the com­puter for­mally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amaz­ing con­trib­u­tor to Linux-based gam­ing, 2000 – 2002 RIP, but it could just as eas­ily have been named after the Norse trick­ster and Odin’s wily accom­plice!) isn’t just the lat­est in a series of bits of elec­tronic gear that some markup and pix­els have been piped off for a cou­ple of years. This is just one step closer to a com­plete clo­sure of a very large chap­ter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incred­i­bly sad.

Please don’t for a minute con­sider this to be my argu­ing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about some­thing far greater and more per­sonal than a star­tlingly reli­able FreeBSD web server that just hap­pened to host a web­site for free for a long time.

There aren’t too many peo­ple you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birth­day, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.

This isn’t an obit­u­ary, just a poor expres­sion of remorse at the (human) dis­con­nec­tion and ‘drifted’ rela­tion­ships of that era. Michael, once all this stu­pid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.

Thankyou.

Tags: ADSL, business grade internet connections, free web space, FreeBSD, ISP, Joker, legitmate software, Linux, Marian Street, powering Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, Smoothwall, web server, web software, Windows 2000