It was sometime in mid-‘98 to mid-‘99 while I was working for the ticketing company.  I had designed the new ticket printing outlets for a local grocery chain.

It would allow customers to walk up to the costumer service windows at these stores and buy tickets to events at the local playhouse and several other venues and special events that the company sold tickets for.

During the week leading up to January 12th 2012, I was working at the Printing Office.  There was some issue with the Netapp boxes and Snapmirror working that the network team and myself had been working on.  The network team had some ideas, but when I left the office on the 12th, it was still not working.

I worked a so-called “Alternative Work Schedule” where I worked 9 hour days, and had every other Friday off.  And Friday the 13th was my AWS day, Making Thursday the 12th was my Friday.

It was during the Stanley Cup in the late ‘90’s.  Final game of 6, and the ticket company was the one who sold the tickets for the event. As walk-up and will-call ticket holders started getting tickets, the load on the storage array had gotten pretty heavy. 

A KNOWN hardware issue in the array’s single point of failure - it’s cache card - was tripped, and the Array crashed.  It actually was designed to do that to protect the data.

Sometime in early ‘94 at the Law Library, we had an ( then ) experimental Linux box.  It was a Dell PC with an early version of Slackware installed.  It was in the office, and I was just sitting there playing around.  At the time, I was still learning UNIX commands.  So I was playing with the infamous finger command. And then I noticed someone logged in that was NOT authorized. 

Back in the golden age of podcasting, Friends in Tech, a production company for podcasts, produced a few specials for some holidays. The first two of which, released Halloween 2005 and 2006, were The Server Room or Horrors and The Server Room of Horrors 2006.

I recently upgraded tesla, my primary Linux desktop, to one of the new Ryzen processors from AMD.  So far it’s working very well, and the performance is sometimes even rather stellar.  One of the big performance boosters, in addition to the Ryzen CPU and doubling the memory, was I went SSD in a big way.

So it was during the government shutdown in October of 2013, which was an odd time.  Fortunately, I was among the lucky ones who got to work, which meant I was guaranteed to get paid, which was good since I was a contractor. The deal for government employees was actually pretty controversial. The trains were running, but on the limited S schedule ( while my train line was, I think others ran on normal schedules ).  AWS was off, which meant I had to work an 8 hour day. With all these schedule changes, it also meant I had to go to a different Train Station in MD.   The trains were mostly empty, the City was like a ghost town. Even access to the building and restrooms was limited.

While it’s a little complicated, and takes fair bit of work, setting up your own email server with lightsail can be done.  And it’s pretty cool to have your own email server.

So it was late ‘95 to early ‘96, and I had just started working full-time at the printer company, with much to learn back then.   So the director of HR calls me up one morning, when I first walk in the door, to tell me her printer isn’t working.

Amazon’s new Lightsail service is pretty amazing.  For practically nothing, you can have a cloud based server. They offer a lot of options, and a good bit of what’s here will be applicable to any of them running Ubuntu, but this is geared toward the Wordpress instance, Which happens to be running Ubuntu Server.  At first I was a bit disappointed, but as I use it, I find it’s actually pretty close to Raspian, which I do, in fact know pretty well, and it’s nice to diversify my Linux skills a bit.