OpenBSD Server Rack (2009)openbsd.org
dormando 373 days ago [-]
At some point the OBSD CVS server was something I donated. Don't think it's in this picture as I don't think it was a Dell. Never saw a picture of the thing in action actually, doh.

I avoided spending a quarter mill on F5's by deploying OpenBSD as firewalls/L4 routers but I was able to keep some of the budget... For a year there I would e-mail them every 6mo and ask what they wanted. Sad when I changed jobs and had to stop.

deusum 373 days ago [-]
Not my kit here... But...

About 20 years ago (in college, of course) I ran OpenBSD on an UltraSparc 5 as our network router.

We had hundreds of meters of Ethernet cable running across the house and out through the windows - by way of a LinkSys switch - as it was the most "economical" route for the network.

WiFi back then was new, expensive, and comparatively slow. Sub 9ms ping is what we needed for gaming, and 54mbit wasn't gonna do it.

I worked hard on the firewall rules, and it had zero downtime, felt like a real sysadmin.

Maybe I was.

intc 373 days ago [-]
aortega 373 days ago [-]
There is always a cyberpunk feel of weird hardware and weird OSes clobbered together with wires and sticky notes.
HeckFeck 373 days ago [-]
This brings back memories of running to the server room when something went wrong, now replaced by an admin panel on $CLOUD_PROVIDER's website. Not quite the same thrill.
hestefisk 372 days ago [-]
Exactly. Computers are boring these days.
mekster 372 days ago [-]
No longer need to call mom from another house to tell how to run some commands as I screwed network settings on reboot.

On a related note, how is EC2 still that hard to have a working offline console?

metadat 375 days ago [-]
Looks pretty nice. Love those sun boxes.

I wonder, what does it look like today?

qbrass 375 days ago [-]
From what's in the picture, no more VAXen, no more SGI boxes, the SUN boxes you love are gone,(assuming you meant the Sparcstations, and not the SPARC 64 stuff), and that Zaurus sitting on top of the left VAX got put out to pasture, too.

Longsoon came and went as a platform between then and now (or at least I didn't see one in the picture, I don't remember what year they came out) and they support more ARM hardware and RISC-V as a platform now.

Assuming they don't have too much ARM hardware, they can probably fit everything they support on one rack now.

lproven 372 days ago [-]
> no more VAXen

Yeah. I tried to donate a VAXstation 4000 to OpenBSD when I was emigrating from the UK. My then-new employers Red Hat offered to ship it to Canada free of charge.

Unfortunately, when he discovered it wasn't the fastest model, Theo de Raadt changed his mind.

It was a couple of years until I had a permanent place to live with some storage space. I asked for it back, and Red Hat Farnborough had lost it.

I am still very unhappy about that. It was quite a valuable machine.

SoftTalker 373 days ago [-]
One or two M1 Mac Minis in there as well I think.
pjmlp 373 days ago [-]
When I got to CERN back in 2002, on my office there was a stack of Sun boxes like those waiting to be collected for recycling purposes, most researchers were already into Windows 2000 or OS X on their desks, while server racks were migrated to a custom Linux distribution, later Scientific Linux.
fsck3r 373 days ago [-]
I always loved this picture