Sysadmin day, II

Con­ti­nuing sys­ad­min day, we repla­ced the trus­ted but alre­a­dy old DSL rou­ter with a new pie­ce of hard­ware. Until today, our DSL line was hand­led by an ISA-based 486 machi­ne with 600mb of disk that con­ta­ins a ker­nel com­pi­led Aug 8, 2001. Ori­gi­nal instal­la­ti­on of that sys­tem (with Net­BSD back then, too) was in 1999; hard­ware was basi­cal­ly unch­an­ged sin­ce. And even today, the sys­tem has an uptime of 112 days—it’s been up sin­ce the last power fail­ure we had. 

But as we’­re curr­ent­ly inves­ti­ga­ting VPN solu­ti­ons and a few other chan­ges to our local net­work, the time has come to put that machi­ne (aptly named ’spee­dy‘) to rest. We took deli­very of the new Dray­tek 2900 that replaces it last week and on sys­ad­min day today, I instal­led it. So this is alre­a­dy pos­ted via that new rou­ter. Con­fi­gu­ra­ti­on was fair­ly straight­for­ward (but then, it’s not the first Dray­tek thing I had my hands on) and went smooth­ly; our off­line time was less than five minutes.

It’s still some­what of an odd fee­ling to power down spee­dy, though. I haven’t yet done that.