Revenni has started a new series of articles dubbed “Open SysAdmin.” But first, a little story.
Twenty years ago on an IRC network long forgotten, a group of like-minded individuals were hacking away trying to get Creative Sound Blaster cards working on a Linux machine so that we could play our favourite MP3s in x11amp. After the music came 3DFX VooDoo2 cards, and of course, Quake. Back then running Linux was a little bit different than it is today. Almost nothing worked out of the box. There was next to no documentation outside of a kernel module text file. We spent weeks participating in low-level development mailing lists trying to get the simplest things working. IRQs, IO addresses, everything was mapped manually and set via physical jumpers on the actual hardware. If this sounds like a foreign language to you, don’t worry, you’re not alone!
In the spirit of Open Source and Community, these efforts inspired us to create a Linux help site.
By combining each area of our expertise, we had all the bases covered, server deployment (no clouds then. VPS providers? Ha! nope.) on physical hardware, server administration, frontend development and design, technical writing, you name it. Over time our site grew from a boutique source of documents on compiling the kernel, LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) stacks, mail, news, and ftp services to a real destination for thousands of people daily. We expanded from just IRC to web forums, starting syndicating news from other sites, and created our own syndication feed.
Archive.org capture of our origin. Circa 2000.
Everyone in our group went on to have very successful careers at some amazing tech companies. A few of us now run our own Linux consulting firms.
We’re celebrating Revenni’s first anniversary by revisiting our roots.
The Open SysAdmin series is a collection of howtos, scripts, and documents that we publish to give back to the community. We have dedicated our careers to Open Source Software and firmly believe in sharing as much as possible.