My story: part one
I have been working with servers, primarily ones that serve web pages, since the late 90s, and the landscape is unrecognizable. Here is a quick overview of my first few years running servers to give you an idea of how I used to operate my early servers.
Like most people at the time, I started with a shared hosting account where I had very little control over anything on the server side when the website I was running outgrew shared hosting due to the forum, which made up part of the site’s popularity. I moved to a dedicated server, where I thought I could flex my future system administrator muscles, but I was wrong.
The server I got was a Cobalt RaQ 3; this was a 1U server appliance that was ahead of its time. However, I did not have root-level access to the machine, and I had to use the web-based control panel for everything I needed to do. Eventually, I got a level of access where I could access the server using Telnet; I now know this isn’t...
