I was looking through the servers I manage, and it’s kind of amazing how many different pieces of software, systems, and random projects I’ve left scattered around.
A lot of them were things I built and never came back to. Others were things I installed, got working, and simply never looked at again.
I just left them there, drifting.
They weren’t really passions of mine. They were experiments.
Recently, I became obsessed with understanding how Usenet works, and before I knew it, I was building my own server. I knew I’d probably never actually use it, but I wanted to understand it.
A hunger to learn, to be more precise.
You can even visit it here: https://skull.black
But Skull Black wasn’t what made me write this post.
What did was a visit to a little Intel NUC from 2019, quietly sitting there, dusty and hidden away in a corner of my rack. Almost invisible on the bottom shelf, except for the little RJ45 light still blinking away.
I decided to check what was running on it and, to my surprise, found a ghostly little IRC network still alive at irc.skull.black.
I also found a Mumble server at voice.skull.black, and an XMPP server running Prosody on some domain left over from some old idea or forgotten experiment.
Maybe it’s finally time to inventory my infrastructure.