Anduin.net

The early years

Back in ’95 I set up the first “server” that was to become Anduin.net. At the time it was running Novell Netware 3.12, and wasn’t really doing much except some file storage. I moved to Molde to study in ’96, and the box finally was graced with an internet connection and an internet-aware operating system (OS/2). It did some FTP for a couple of years, until early ’99.

At that time, my girlfriend (now wife) gave me her old laptop to play with. It wasn’t much of a box, but with a PCMCIA ethernet card, an upgraded harddrive, some extra memory, and Slackware Linux, it became the first Anduin.net. There are files on my servers today dating from back then, and since that day it has been my primary email host.

At this point, I started giving away shell- and mail accounts to friends and others. I hooked the laptop (affectionately named “Bruno” by my girlfriend) up to the college network, registered the domain, and since then anduin.net has been online more or less permanently.

Going “pro”

In 2000 it went with me to Hamburg, Germany, where I moved in with my wife-to-be. Immediately after arriving, I moved everything into an old PC of mine – faster than the laptop, and with more reliable storage. About a year later, it was upgraded again, this time entering a rackmount chassis and shipped off to a professional hosting facility. By this time I had about 50 active users.

By 2002 I had grown sick and tired of Slackware, Linux, the myriad of distros and the lack of decent software management systems (that I knew of). I started tinkering with FreeBSD, and soon after upgraded the server to FreeBSD 4.5 (I think). At first I tried to keep the home directories on a Linux filesystem under FreeBSD, but while vacationing on the worlds second most beautiful island (Tioman, Malaysia), I learned the lesson not to do that.

Current state of affairs

After a disastrous move within Hamburg, which cost me two years of programming work and associated headaches, I decided to move the servers (I had two at this point) to Norway. Early 2005 I went down to Hamburg by car to pick up the systems, drove them back to Oslo, and installed them at the hosting centre run by my employer at the time. Though I have changed jobs since, the servers remain there (as I still have “some” degree of control over the facility), and will do so for some time to come.