from Hacker News

Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

by j4nek on 4/6/23, 2:20 PM with 119 comments

• by sillysaurusx on 4/6/23, 3:01 PM

  I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count?

  Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balkanized across IRC and whatever we used before Google.

  I also started writing a FF7 walkthrough all on a single page, because I didn’t know how to link from one page to another. I made the different chapters different font colors, reasoning that it was good enough to change the color when you’re trying to figure out which section to get to. Good times…

  EDIT: Whoa. The view count is real time. You can see how quickly HN is hammering the page by refreshing it. The guestbook works too. I wonder what the tech stack looks like.

  Doing this in modern times would be so complicated. You’ll need a database, then software to talk to the database, and maybe webpack.

• by seba_dos1 on 4/6/23, 2:55 PM

  Except it's not, not really - it's hosted by Cloudflare which even requires you to enable JavaScript to pass.

• by serialport on 4/6/23, 4:58 PM

  Hey, site admin here. The server got overloaded! we'll try to reboot it and bring it back

    bash# w
    sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

• by ajsnigrutin on 4/6/23, 3:00 PM

  24 years is not actually THAT old...

  The cpu (AMD K6-2 300 MHz) is a lot faster than a raspberry pi 1 for many things, it has 512mb of ram, so for running a simple webpage, it should still work good enough.

  edit: especially with cloudflare infront of it...

• by jamesgill on 4/6/23, 3:43 PM

  * Guestbook: check

  * Animated gif: check

  * View counter: check

  * Repeating background image: check

  * Mobile? What's that? : check

  Those were the days.

• by bennyp101 on 4/6/23, 4:30 PM

  Ah man, I always wanted a Cobalt RaQ server - they looked so cool! I seem to remember people reselling access to them and they had web guis that looked like them as well, I think a friend had one

• by jarebear6expepj on 4/6/23, 4:28 PM

  When the '24 year old Linux server' is asking me to solve captchas for cloudflare...

• by johnklos on 4/7/23, 2:13 AM

    Icon for raq.serialport.orgraq.serialport.org
    Checking if the site connection is secure
    raq.serialport.org needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
    Why am I seeing this page?
  

  Cloudflare's bullshit strikes again!

  Here's a real server, hosting without a caching proxy, that's 30 years old:

  http://elsie.zia.io/

• by tristor on 4/6/23, 3:34 PM

  Oh man, this brought back memories. I used to work on Cobalt web servers, I had a stack of them at home after they eventually ended up decommissioned and these were the basis (along with some Sun pizza boxes) for most of my home lab projects for many years.

• by amrb on 4/6/23, 3:53 PM

  This is a great video covering the story on the company, who build this server and an early example of using Linux for web hosting!

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ6AvtV3Ya4

• by ashleyn on 4/6/23, 2:55 PM

  Surely hope that isn't running a 24-year old Linux distribution...

• by leke on 4/6/23, 5:01 PM

  Yep, looks like we finally killed it.

• by tablespoon on 4/6/23, 4:17 PM

  > Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

  Isn't that kind of mundane? The web was well-established by 1999, and the hardware of that era was literally designed and built to serve websites like this.

• by cellularmitosis on 4/7/23, 5:11 AM

  > CPU: AMD K6-2 300 MHz

  Ah, I was hoping this was a MIPS model

• by sroussey on 4/7/23, 1:03 AM

  I used to run servers for a decade or more. Biggest fears: 1) fan on motherboard going out, 2) rebooting, if it hadn’t for years as I didn’t trust the startup disk.