I grew up poor, and reached adulthood at the tail end of the BBS days / start of the internet revolution. It was frustrating seeing so much history go by and not being able to take part in it.
Started playing with Linux early because, I think, I resented my parents never signing the permission form to let me get a school UNIX account. They thought I’d rack up thousands in long distance charges somehow. But I got Slackware 3.1 later as an adult.
I guess I wanted a taste of that “whee I’m a sysop too!” experience because in 2000 I stood up a personal domain and started making shell accounts for people on IRC. Part of my username dot net, though there’s nothing really there now. I was a bad sysadmin, though generous with my time and resources. Eventually it started feeling like a crushing weight of unresolved commitments, as the server needed more and more work that I didn’t know how to do.
The site eventually died in 2015 I think, ancient IDE hard drive finally clicked itself to death. Even more depressing. And then in the process of trying to recover the drive with Spinrite I straight up lost the drive. I think I didn’t label it well and it disappeared into a box with other IDE drives.
I found the drive again recently. I’ve been a professional C# developer since 2012 and since 2016 I’ve been with an awesome company and gotten to see a bunch of the ops side. That’s inspired me to try to get back into it, but with modern standards and security. And three ESXi servers.
Just last night I mostly finished loading my old passwd, shadow, and groups info into openldap. Got 400+ users, though I’m sure most were just ftp users who grabbed some fansub anime and split. Had 98 distinct file owners in /home/httpd/html, mostly web comics or personal file dumps. 15-ish phpbb boards. I’d love to get that all back online.
I know that won’t bring the 2000s back. Several of my users have probably passed away. Nobody will care about most of this. But it’ll feel like I’m closing out an older chapter of my life in a better way, if I get everything back online.
(And if I need to job hunt again, I can point to the site and say “behold my awesome devops skills! I can accomplish in months what a competent person can do in days!”)