farewell

[perlmonger]

Today I’m mostly doing a variety of “dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdaX” after a sequence of less drastic deletions, service shutdowns and other housekeeping. Our second ever server[¹] on teh intarweb, fhez, is finally being retired in the face of a large increase in hosting charges - it’s not done anything but be a database mirror and recipient of backups for years now anyhow and, at its 512MB mobo memory limit, it’s not likely to do much else again.

So, farewell then fhez; you served web pages reliably and well for us and our clients for many years, but it’s time to bow out gracefully now before the last working fan or two in your 1u case gives out and you self-immolate.

[¹] our first ever server was a borrowed Cobalt Qube, but IIRC we only ever hosted personal sites on there.

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

My hosting bill has nearly tripled this year but I am renting a machine off Bytemark. - Give me a shout if you want to host anything off it (at cost price :-)

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Thanks! We're not short of capacity, though; we only kept fhez up as it wasn't costing us much and an extra backup was insurance against the off chance of the live, primary backup and remote backup boxes dying simultaneously. We'll live with that risk now, I think :)

[budleysalterton.livejournal.com]

Once you retrieve the tool for the job is

DBAN - http://dban.sourceforge.net/

just the thing for retired machines/disks.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Too late for fhez, but the network boot version of that looks handy for future needs: thanks for the link.