Be the signal

Once upon a time, a 4U server was donated to SLUG, for use as a web and list server. Though it wasn’t wildly powerful, it became known as “The Six Million Dollar” machine, because it had really earned its keep in a past life.

As soon as it was delivered, I used the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card to install slink. But it was the faultless, online upgrade to potato (using Progsoc’s bountiful university bandwidth) that really blew my mind. Setting up the SLUG machine was my first experience installing Debian. I’ve been using it ever since.

Though it was unimaginatively known as ‘slug’ for a spell, the machine was later blessed as ‘maddog’, a tribute to Jon ‘maddog’ Hall — wise uncle, grandfather and godfather to the Linux community, and speaker at linux.conf.au 2001.

A couple of months ago, after a number of hardware maladies, ‘maddog’ was decommissioned. The SLUG web and mail services are now operating under a Xen virtual machine called ‘rusty’, a tribute to Rusty Russell — goofy big brother and whip-cracker to the Linux Australia community.

Quiet little tributes.