The Server That Wasn't Meant to Exist

Summary

Yesterday I read a piece of news that brought back an important - and painful - episode from my career. A story about trust, technology... and the kind of problems that can't always be solved.About 16 years ago, I was contacted by an old friend. He was worried about a situation involving some mutual acquaintances. To keep it short: an entrepreneur - administrator and owner of several companies - had died suddenly. He was the kind of man who centralized everything, and his wife and children found themselves struggling to manage things. One of the sons decided to cash out and leave the family business (focusing on his own career), while the others chose to stay involved in day-to-day operations. The wife, elderly and retired for years, ended up at the helm, but she was clearly out of her depth.The main issue was the complete lack of information flow: no digital systems of any kind were in place. Employees had their own PCs (sometimes even personal laptops), and there was zero control over anything. All the accounting and administrative data were scattered across individual machines, often taken home at the end of the day. From the owners’ perspective, all they saw was a huge cash flow coming in - yet the accounts were always in the red."If we keep going like this, we’ll be bankrupt in just a few years", I was told. What I could do was set up a proper IT system, structured to make data management transparent and traceable.I planned - and got immediate approval for - the purchase of routers, switches, various networking devices and a server with several disks.The OS of choice, as was my habit at the time, was NetBSD. Thanks to XEN, I set up multiple VMs. One handled the NAS duties (using Samba, so PCs could connect and store files directly there), another ran Archivista. I even worked on translating Archivista’s interface into Italian, since it wasn’t yet localized, just to make it easier for users.As usual in those days, I added a caching proxy (Squid) and a content fi...