This is a historic document and refers to the state in 2009. As described in the body, it won't be updated.

In early 2001, I was a member of the board of AUUG, the Australian UNIX User's Group. At a meeting we decided that we needed better access to the web server than the current arrangement allowed. Simon Hackett of Internode generously offered us not just free colocation and connectivity, but even the machine. On 27 April 2001 I went to Internode—still in York St. in those days—and set up the machine:

Image title: www.auug.org.au          Dimensions:          2048 x 1536, 494 kB Make a single page with this image Hide this image Make this image a thumbnail Make thumbnails of all images on this page Make this image small again Display small version of all images on this page All images taken on Wednesday, 25 April 2001, thumbnails          All images taken on Wednesday, 25 April 2001, small Diary entry for Wednesday, 25 April 2001 Complete exposure details

 

From then on, the machine Just Ran. On 20 March 2003, the day the Americans invaded Iraq, I put in a new disk (10 GB, donated by Luigi Cantoni). I still have the old disk (1275 MB). On 8 September 2005 the on-board Ethernet port died, and I had to insert a PCI Ethernet card. Apart from that, the only times it went down were when it was moved to a different location, which happened two or three times. In general, a machine that few people ever saw. It's one of the few machines that Netcraft still maintain statistics about—average uptime about 340 days.

The link above contains many invalid references to Netcraft-specific pages.

All that changed on 21 September 2009: the system went off the air round 17:00, possibly as a result of a loss of power in the data centre, but it didn't come back up. When we located it, it proved to have a defective system disk.

As the photos show, it was not the newest machine in the world, and as the dmesg output shows, even at the time it was underpowered:

We never upgraded the system beyond FreeBSD 4.2. Like AUUG itself, it was moribund. We won't try to revive it. Stephen Rothwell will install the web data, itself obsolete, on a new machine in Canberra—running Linux, not FreeBSD. If you ask me for one indication of when AUUG really died, it would be the loss of the real web server.