RIP DoctorQ

It appears that, after something like 6-7 years of non-stop running, my poor decrepit Linux server "DoctorQ" has pitched its last bit.

The only impact that this will have on the world in general is that some of my image links and sigs will be busted for a few days, and a couple of web sites that almost no-one visits will go dark until I move them somewhere else.

But for me, it's the end of an era. Or perhaps, the end of a series of meaningful errors.

DoctorQ was my first home server, a 166 (yep, I'm that old and then some, but the parts were old when I built it) with 128 megs of RAM, bodged together out of parts, the lineage of which I really don't recall. It started out as an experiment, did stints as a print server, DNS server, firewall, web server, test bed, and very briefly, completely annoying Linux desktop. I painted the case with some red boat enamel (my only case mod ever) and left it at my Mom's when I left Vancouver, where, until yesterday it was doing firewall chores, and serving up 5 or 6 low-traffic web sites, mostly so that I had a test server to monkey about with.

Or with which about to monkey.

As I said, it ran pretty much non-stop. I only shut it down to be physically moved (4 times), and have new drives added (twice), or when the power went out.

Yesterday DoctorQ got unplugged, and would not come back up and talk to the Internet. It's 1500 miles away, and I can't shell in, so I can't fix what's wrong. There had been some previous flakiness, and it's reached a point at which it's more trouble than it would be worth to fix. I have hosting elsewhere, and Mom's better off with a nice simple firewall/router, which are practically free.

I like Mom and all, but she does not have teh l337 h4Xor sK1llz. I'm pretty sure that, given the colour of the case, she's got a different understanding of the term "Red Hat Box" than I intended.

I don't like computers or software any more than I like spoons or doorbells or hammers--they are tools I use to do things I want to do. I'm here for the soup not the spoon. The only thing that excites me about hardware and software is the potential it holds to get that stuff done. I'm much more interested in an old guitar than a brand new computer.

Given that, I wonder why it took me so long to make the decision to shut DoctorQ down. I think it's because I'll miss it.

I put a lot of time into that machine, and got a lot of use out of it. I read and fought and configured and bashed my way through scripts. I set stuff up, and then set it up again, and then tweaked it and then replaced it. I asked and got answers to about ten thousand unbelievably stupid questions (and I admit that some percentage of those were repeats, which makes them even worse). I solved a ton of my own and other people's problems. I learned a lot. I did a lot. I repeatedly got that feeling that you get when you finally get something to work just right, so that it solves a problem or does some work better than you could do it any other way. It's the same feeling I got a long time ago, when I first started to understand the scope and promise of this computer stuff.



In return, I repeatedly subjected DoctorQ (and my friend Barclay, who has given me more help--and taken more of my crap--than any human being should be expected to) to a lot of swearing and abuse that rightly should have landed on the head of every goofball who ever misdocumented (or didn't document), or included vapourware in a distro I tried, or just didn't think things through, or built it user-hostile, or DIDN'T build a nice, simple text editor, or bought it and shot it, or did any one of the million other things that keep this computer stuff the crappy, over-hyped, bullshit nightmare that it is.

So yeah, I'll miss DoctorQ.

With any luck, it will be the last computer I miss.