Retirement Party!


Not mine, sadly, but the ancient NetEngine WebEngine that was dotclue.org for so many years. I pulled it from the co-lo on my way into work this morning, and its reward for fourteen years of faithful service will be a disk scrub and an e-waste bin.

By the way, for all the sometimes-deserved criticism that OpenBSD and its wranglers get, I was still running v3.3 without anyone ever successfully breaking in. I locked it down with a very small set of services, and required non-root logins with ssh keys, and Theo’s Paranoid Army took care of the rest. I applied the various security patches that came out in 2003-2004, but that’s it.

I don’t recommend not updating your server for 14 years, but you can go a lot longer between updates if you start with something designed for security.

Amusingly, I still own the even-older server that hosted munitions.com back in the days when it was shared between folks at WebTV, but I doubt I have anything left that could mount those disks to scrub them, so they’ll just get the sledgehammer treatment, and then go into the e-waste bin.


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