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This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours busin

This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours business racks, and often have little blog posts like this on their PHP-Nuke clan website or in-game MOTD, containing whatever little peril the admin had to deal with hosting the server... from kids tripping on wires to rats nesting in the chassis, it was always fun to read. When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That's a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.

CydeWeys 3y ago
The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps.
- MandieD 3y ago
  56k dialup? Luxury! 1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for. Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect. I hope you’re enjoying a good retirement.
  - felipemnoa 3y ago
    >>Bonus Army I have tiny recollection of this this but thanks to your comment I became acquainted with it again. Thanks!
- leereeves 3y ago
  > the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps. I still have ADSL. It's now 5 Mbps, but I don't recall what it was when dial up was common.
  - InvaderFizz 3y ago
    144kbps(IDSL, actually ISDN), 384kbps, 768kbps, and 1.5mbps were incredibly common speeds during the early days and especially not in major cities. I was on dialup in BFE, switch to 64k ISDN in 97/98, and cable came alone at a whopping 3mbps in 99, complete game changer. Higher speeds of DSL came along with ADSL2 in 2002/2003. There were higher than 1.5mbps before that, but you basically had to be across the street from the CO to get that.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      I grew up in a small town that Europeans would have a hard time calling it a village. We were too far away from a CO to get DSL even with repeaters. No cable provider wanted to bring us service either as there were not enough people to ever recovering the expense of stringing the lines. The best I ever had while living there was 33.6k using a 56k modem
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    Where do you live?! I thought we had it bad with 15Mbps ADSL in rural Vermont. YouTube and Netflix are surprisingly tolerable as long as only one person is watching. How is it for you at 5? Do you get cell service? We don't and that's actually the bigger hassle. Wi-Fi calling is kind of shit, and the coverage outside the house is appallingly unreliable. iMessage is frustratingly unreliable too. I'll be on Wi-Fi, but it won't have gotten synched up with Verizon and it'll refuse to send a message until it does.
    - leereeves 3y ago
      At 5 Mbps, YouTube only works up to 720p. I assume streaming is the same but haven't seen one that reports the current resolution. We do have cell service. We're in an older 1950s development that was never rewired, but not far from newer developments. The biggest problem for me is that downloads keep getting bigger and bigger. The latest AAA games are almost 100 GB and take days to download.
- time0ut 3y ago
  I moved into the dorms with two computers: a gaming laptop circa 2001 and a cheap AMD Duron based box running Linux and the counterstrike server software. Good times.
ericbarrett 3y ago
When I was young I ran a Team Fortress Classic server from my living room. It was hooked up to 768k SDSL (symmetric). It was 2fort-only—still a common thing in TF2—and popular enough that it was full 24/7, with a 20 player limit. Had lots of regulars, some of whom stayed in touch for years afterward. Some of the things that caused downtime: The house's floor slab had a crack that wicked up groundwater when it rained too much, so my carpet would get mushy. Electronics off! The anti-cheat software I ran (PunkBusters) went crazy after an update and banned anybody who connected. I noticed when my MRTG graphs flatlined. Girlfriend once yanked out the Ethernet cable when we were having adult time. I didn't bother explaining that one to the players. Heavy web browsing would cause lag, so I ended up learning how to do QoS via iptables (or its precursor, whose name I forgot). At the time, the server used an astonishing 25 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. Always raised an eyebrow with the ISP tech when I called in, but they never complained.
- dizhn 3y ago
  ipchains
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    [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wes-k 3y ago
  TFC! I ran a TFC concing server from my college dorm back in 2004/2005. Been dreaming of setting up my old PC to play again.
- ShroudedNight 3y ago
  I miss TFC. I remember learning how to conc-jump with the medic and figuring out the detonation points for pyro, and ultimately getting to the point where my presence was materially beneficial to my team. I never managed to get there in TF2; they had (at least at first glance - I presume the meta simply changed) blunted the ability of a single player to significantly move objectives forward. I had already been burnt by the changes between Day of Defeat, and DoD: Source, and the TF2 changes seemed to confirm that I was simply not a member of the target audience for the Source remakes.
midasuni 3y ago
Less fun, and more common.
shadowgovt 3y ago
I remember back in the day when the something awful forums went down for a while because of hurricane Katrina. They had a message up for a while that said they were unavailable because their servers were either underwater, or on the back of a looter's truck that was itself underwater.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Their colo was on Poydras St in downtown NOLA.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
Learning the difficulties of self-hosting is a rite of passage for tech minded people. It seems nearly everyone goes through a “How hard can it be?” phase where self-hosting seems like it will be a trivial way to save a lot of money. Then you get to learn about all of the things that can, and will, go wrong over time. Great learning experience. And then there are the rose-colored glasses people who seem to forget all of the troubles they go through with self-hosting. A few companies back we had a guy who insisted on self-hosting some things on premises to save on SaaS costs. The amount of time we spent waiting for him to figure out why the server was misbehaving each week easily cost several times more than any hypothetical savings. Yet when you ask him, he’d claim it was virtually hassle-free. Management liked it because it “saved a lot of money”… as long as you ignore the cost of the time we lost to dealing with it.
- api 3y ago
  Where I always go with this is to ask why our software is so damn horrible that it requires this much babysitting. Self hosting could be trivial if our software wasn’t slop. I wonder how much we spend babysitting slop (either directly or indirectly through SaaS) vs how much it would cost to invest in engineering around automated and reliable deployment and resilient software? Highly polished distributed file systems, databases, and orchestration tools that incorporated automatic replication and fail over would be a great start. Don’t just say “it’s hard.” Of course it is. But is it cheaper to do this or to babysit rickety piles of junk? Another possible way out is AI sysadmins. I wonder how far we are from AIs that can admin a cluster including upgrades and disaster recovery?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hattmall 3y ago
    I can't imagine having to unfuck the complicated systems set up by an AI sysadmin when the system running the AI goes down.
    - 3y ago
duxup 3y ago
My DSL line hosted so much quake except when I needed to do something else… So did my work computer;)
lrem 3y ago
It's not like the fun of animals nesting in your expensive equipment went away. You are simply paying for someone else to experience that.
thathndude 3y ago
Agreed. Feel like there’s a proper life lesson in here about enjoying the difficulties and embracing the journey. The destination might get a bit boring.
jszymborski 3y ago
PHP-Nuke, how cool I thought it was when I was a kid... how hilariously riddled with bugs, but also how cool
codethief 3y ago
> on their PHP-Nuke clan website Wow, I haven't seen or heard that name since the 2000s. Good times.
eternityforest 3y ago
Cloudflare's tunnel and similar solutions might make self hosting semi-reasonable(For anything where one can accept the third party routing). I wonder if people will experiment more?

CydeWeys 3y ago

The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps.

MandieD 3y ago
56k dialup? Luxury! 1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for. Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect. I hope you’re enjoying a good retirement.
- felipemnoa 3y ago
  >>Bonus Army I have tiny recollection of this this but thanks to your comment I became acquainted with it again. Thanks!
leereeves 3y ago
> the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps. I still have ADSL. It's now 5 Mbps, but I don't recall what it was when dial up was common.
- InvaderFizz 3y ago
  144kbps(IDSL, actually ISDN), 384kbps, 768kbps, and 1.5mbps were incredibly common speeds during the early days and especially not in major cities. I was on dialup in BFE, switch to 64k ISDN in 97/98, and cable came alone at a whopping 3mbps in 99, complete game changer. Higher speeds of DSL came along with ADSL2 in 2002/2003. There were higher than 1.5mbps before that, but you basically had to be across the street from the CO to get that.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I grew up in a small town that Europeans would have a hard time calling it a village. We were too far away from a CO to get DSL even with repeaters. No cable provider wanted to bring us service either as there were not enough people to ever recovering the expense of stringing the lines. The best I ever had while living there was 33.6k using a 56k modem
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  Where do you live?! I thought we had it bad with 15Mbps ADSL in rural Vermont. YouTube and Netflix are surprisingly tolerable as long as only one person is watching. How is it for you at 5? Do you get cell service? We don't and that's actually the bigger hassle. Wi-Fi calling is kind of shit, and the coverage outside the house is appallingly unreliable. iMessage is frustratingly unreliable too. I'll be on Wi-Fi, but it won't have gotten synched up with Verizon and it'll refuse to send a message until it does.
  - leereeves 3y ago
    At 5 Mbps, YouTube only works up to 720p. I assume streaming is the same but haven't seen one that reports the current resolution. We do have cell service. We're in an older 1950s development that was never rewired, but not far from newer developments. The biggest problem for me is that downloads keep getting bigger and bigger. The latest AAA games are almost 100 GB and take days to download.
time0ut 3y ago
I moved into the dorms with two computers: a gaming laptop circa 2001 and a cheap AMD Duron based box running Linux and the counterstrike server software. Good times.

ericbarrett 3y ago

When I was young I ran a Team Fortress Classic server from my living room. It was hooked up to 768k SDSL (symmetric). It was 2fort-only—still a common thing in TF2—and popular enough that it was full 24/7, with a 20 player limit. Had lots of regulars, some of whom stayed in touch for years afterward. Some of the things that caused downtime: The house's floor slab had a crack that wicked up groundwater when it rained too much, so my carpet would get mushy. Electronics off! The anti-cheat software I ran (PunkBusters) went crazy after an update and banned anybody who connected. I noticed when my MRTG graphs flatlined. Girlfriend once yanked out the Ethernet cable when we were having adult time. I didn't bother explaining that one to the players. Heavy web browsing would cause lag, so I ended up learning how to do QoS via iptables (or its precursor, whose name I forgot). At the time, the server used an astonishing 25 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. Always raised an eyebrow with the ISP tech when I called in, but they never complained.

dizhn 3y ago
ipchains
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wes-k 3y ago
TFC! I ran a TFC concing server from my college dorm back in 2004/2005. Been dreaming of setting up my old PC to play again.
ShroudedNight 3y ago
I miss TFC. I remember learning how to conc-jump with the medic and figuring out the detonation points for pyro, and ultimately getting to the point where my presence was materially beneficial to my team. I never managed to get there in TF2; they had (at least at first glance - I presume the meta simply changed) blunted the ability of a single player to significantly move objectives forward. I had already been burnt by the changes between Day of Defeat, and DoD: Source, and the TF2 changes seemed to confirm that I was simply not a member of the target audience for the Source remakes.

midasuni 3y ago

Less fun, and more common.

shadowgovt 3y ago

I remember back in the day when the something awful forums went down for a while because of hurricane Katrina. They had a message up for a while that said they were unavailable because their servers were either underwater, or on the back of a looter's truck that was itself underwater.

selimthegrim 3y ago
Their colo was on Poydras St in downtown NOLA.

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

Learning the difficulties of self-hosting is a rite of passage for tech minded people. It seems nearly everyone goes through a “How hard can it be?” phase where self-hosting seems like it will be a trivial way to save a lot of money. Then you get to learn about all of the things that can, and will, go wrong over time. Great learning experience. And then there are the rose-colored glasses people who seem to forget all of the troubles they go through with self-hosting. A few companies back we had a guy who insisted on self-hosting some things on premises to save on SaaS costs. The amount of time we spent waiting for him to figure out why the server was misbehaving each week easily cost several times more than any hypothetical savings. Yet when you ask him, he’d claim it was virtually hassle-free. Management liked it because it “saved a lot of money”… as long as you ignore the cost of the time we lost to dealing with it.

api 3y ago
Where I always go with this is to ask why our software is so damn horrible that it requires this much babysitting. Self hosting could be trivial if our software wasn’t slop. I wonder how much we spend babysitting slop (either directly or indirectly through SaaS) vs how much it would cost to invest in engineering around automated and reliable deployment and resilient software? Highly polished distributed file systems, databases, and orchestration tools that incorporated automatic replication and fail over would be a great start. Don’t just say “it’s hard.” Of course it is. But is it cheaper to do this or to babysit rickety piles of junk? Another possible way out is AI sysadmins. I wonder how far we are from AIs that can admin a cluster including upgrades and disaster recovery?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hattmall 3y ago
  I can't imagine having to unfuck the complicated systems set up by an AI sysadmin when the system running the AI goes down.
  - 3y ago

duxup 3y ago

My DSL line hosted so much quake except when I needed to do something else… So did my work computer;)

lrem 3y ago

It's not like the fun of animals nesting in your expensive equipment went away. You are simply paying for someone else to experience that.

thathndude 3y ago

Agreed. Feel like there’s a proper life lesson in here about enjoying the difficulties and embracing the journey. The destination might get a bit boring.

jszymborski 3y ago

PHP-Nuke, how cool I thought it was when I was a kid... how hilariously riddled with bugs, but also how cool

codethief 3y ago

> on their PHP-Nuke clan website Wow, I haven't seen or heard that name since the 2000s. Good times.

eternityforest 3y ago

Cloudflare's tunnel and similar solutions might make self hosting semi-reasonable(For anything where one can accept the third party routing). I wonder if people will experiment more?