Colossus's 10th Birthday!
Well, it’s close to it anyway. To be honest I don’t recall the exact date I fired it up, but it was shortly after I started my first year of college. For those who do not know, Colossus is currently our primary file server, DNS server, and DHCP server in our house. Colossus has been with us now for 10 years and has changed its role over the years, facilitating a variety of purposes.
Colossus was built soon after I joined the CTS Telecomm department at the University of Portland during my freshman year, in an effort to better understand Linux. Simply put, I am a kinetic learner, therefore the only why I will understand many IT technologies is to install them and use them on a regular basis. The senior members of the CTS team used another personal server called Snafu which was their project box and home dial-in server. Not wanted to be outdone, I built up Colossus which was named after the supercomputer in the 70s movie “Colossus: The Forbin Project“. Colossus originally ran RH Linux v5.2, and was slowly upgraded on the RH line through the years. Colossus started its life using my old workstation hardware, and it would receive the latest hand-me-down hardware all through school. Originally, a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 3.5GB HD, it served as fairly reliable hobby server.
As years went on, Colossus became a great refuge for folks wanting to host their website and have a separate email system separated from the University. At its peak it had 23 users on the system. Colossus underwent a lot of scrutiny and trouble during the college years including one Windows administrator concerned that since it was DNS server it could bring down the whole University if it allowed zone transfers. It was relocated more times than I can count including hiding out in dorm data room, enduring a 80-90 degree storage closet, and sitting in a proper rack in the switch room.
A Dogs Breakfast divx After school, the need for private web space dropped off as did many of the users. Even though Colossus continued to host a number sites including our photo gallery and personal blogs, I began to become increasingly concerned about my data. So Colossus was slowly retired from the web hosting service and began to serve our household data. With my post-college paychecks I was finally able to afford a bit better hardware for the server so that it could adequately perform and had sufficient redundancy to safeguard our information. Despite my best efforts, Colossus has crashed more times than I can count due to hardware failure. At its lowest point, I was in Cincinnati advising Natalie how to completely rebuild the hardware from spare parts after it tanked. That was during the phase where it was blowing up a RAID member every 6 months for no reason.
Finally, midway through 2008 thanks to VMware releasing ESXi for free, I was able to virtualize my whole environment. It was kind of the end of era for Colossus as it went from being a physical system to a virtual server for the first time. From a management-, redundancy-, and HA-standpoint it is in a far superior configuration now. At the same time, I dumped the less-than-stable Fedora Core distros for CentOS 5. Colossus continues to host our data with over 1.2TB of NAS space available, serving as our DNS and DHCP servers, as well as still remains a place for hobby-development.
For pure amusement, I dug up the original website for Colossus from when it was serving as file-hosting webserver:
