Before the Cloud

Circa 2003

I was reminiscing through some old photos this past weekend and I came across these pictures of my old server farm…

In the days before the cloud, I hosted a server farm at home using five static IP addresses on a DSL circuit with 5 Mbps downstream and 512 Kbps upstream (that was the fasted DSL I could find in 2002). Utilizing old laptops was great since they effectively had built in UPS (uninterruptible power supplies).

At Apple, when an employee left the company or upgraded hardware, the old hardware would pile up in closet until it was overflowing and then we'd be given the greenlight to take home whatever we wanted before it was thrown in the recycle bin. By that point, the hardwas was several years old, but still very useful to me. Eventually, after I left Apple, I moved to Mac minis which ran headless with an external UPS.

Circa 2009

Servers

Web server (Apache)

App server (WebObjects)

Database Server (OpenBase)

Mail server (running on Windows 2000)

DNS server (QuickDNS)

File server (AFP)

I typically named the servers after places I had lived: Capitola, Nairobi, Djibouti, Carlsbad, Huntington, etc. This setup served me well for more than a decade.