Monday, July 09, 2007

Monolith

After something like 15 years, I have stopped receiving email on Monolith. A few minutes ago I changed the forwarding address in LDAP to forward email off-campus exclusively.

Monolith began as a NeXTslab computer on my desk top. It was my main workstation from the early 90s until maybe about 1997. The system was first set up in my office in Uppergate House, then made the move to Cox Hall. It also went with me for the brief stint in the University Apartments Tower penthouse. Sometime in 1997, when I moved from Cox Hall to the North Decatur Building, Monolith's soul moved to a SPARCstation 5 and Solaris 2.5.1. In later years it evolved into an Ultra 10, then a Sunblade 150. The OS probably made its way through Solaris 2.6, and maybe Solaris 9. I don't recall if it was ever Solaris 8.

For the past few years, Monolith left my main workstation and became a more humble Debian Linux box running on a Pentium II system with 96 MB of RAM and a 4-GB hard drive. It's been serving it's main duties as an email server (running Exim for the MTA and Cyrus IMAP), and a web serve running Apache. For the past six months, Monolith has been hiding in the machine room on the fourth floor of the Woodruff Library.

Today I'll shut down the web server and email services and then will remove the box sometime this week.