Matis Blog

This obituary is so far behind times, that I have to be a bit sketchy on the details. swi.priv.at once led an interesting life: It had a nice career, a google-search still reveals quite a few email-addresses and it apparently once was home to interesting projects such as raw.at. Most importantly, this server was run by (now ex-)activists of the Fachschaft Informatik. As you may know, Skunk went to Bulgaria last year and I took over the top-level server-management (that means coordination, no real technical work) from him. We went through all the machines and realized: swi.priv.at wasn't pinging back.

We realized that we knew nobody from back then, swi was a really old server (intel 486!) and the admins were last seen years ago and we didn't have any phone-numbers. Note that with "admins" I mean names that we heard, but mostly couldn't even remember a face to. This is ancient history. So I first asked someone who was an fsinf-activist very long ago... but that was too long ago: "we didn't have any internet at the fsinf back then". Well... next try, his answer: "This machine hasn't been pinging for at least three years". So we unplugged the machine and I took home the disks (after Meks connected me with the admins and I got confirmation that I could do this) and did a nice little disk-dump. Amazingly, one of the disks was a working IBM Deathstar.

I didn't bother looking into the many home-dirs... but one: the user "fsinf". What I found was absolutely amazing... Check this!