Thanks for interesting story; very sadly. Just out of curiosity, what hardware was it?
On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 01:23:52PM +0100, Alexander Bochmann wrote: > ...was rather unspectacular: Hardware failiure. > > The system's name was "base", originally installed with > OpenBSD 2.3 on Jun 12, 1998: > > -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5 Jun 12 1998 etc/myname > > It ran the OpenBSD 2.3 kernel and most of the userland until > it stopped responding about three weeks ago and couldn't be > resurrected. > > Small hardware problems had happened before, as with most > systems that have been running uninterrupted for nearly 10 > years, but this time I decided against getting it up again: > Running modern software had gotten a real chore (never managed > to backport OpenSSH, for example, so it still had the last > version of the old ssh.com daemon (1.2.32?). > (Well, that, and the 2.3 GENERIC kernel reliably shot down > the VMWare session I tried to get it running in.) > > Good old internet software like sendmail or bind never were > a problem though, even in their most recent versions (which may > or may not be a compliment, depending on your point of view). > > To my knowlege, the system never was hacked - despite running > software like qpop 2.53 or really, really old versions of > apache and php. (I sometimes found core files, but I guess > the system was just too obscure to be a valid target for > any type of automated attack.) > > base had lots of old stuff still lying around, like an emergency > netboot environment for the sun3/160 that it had replaced as main > server for infra.de back at the time, an Amanda client for my > old employer's network backup system that's long gone, or the > configuration for half a dozen UUCP feeds which have lost > their peers ages ago. > > Gone are the days when 32MB RAM was a lot, a stripped down OpenBSD > kernel had a whopping 1MB, and a handful of blacklists got rid > of almost all of the spam. > > -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1056157 Jul 31 2002 /bsd > > Alex. > -- C programmers never die. They're just cast into void. () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments
