London.pm have their very own box, called penderel (after one of the pubs we used to visit. Unfortunately it's been less than reliable recently; there's not been anyone regularly sysadminning it and the graphics and network cards seemed able to make it die regularly.
A couple of weeks back Alex replaced the graphics and network cards (and is in the process of getting a new motherboard and processor), and since then it's seemed stable, but the underlying problem that no-one was willing to sysadmin it remained. More london.pm-ers seem to favour Debian than anything else, and after the usual interminable IRC debates, I decided that I may as well spend one day of this long weekend replacing the existing RedHat install.
Unfortunately, things didn't go to plan. The most serious hiccup- and entirely my own fault- was that I didn't back up the existing install. I thought I'd taken backups of /etc, /var/log and , but I'd managed to back them up to /root not /home/blech, and that got deleted when I reformatted the main partition.
LILO also seemed inexplicably unhappy, so for now penderel relies on a boot floppy, and I'm only slowly putting back all the user authentication that I managed to lose. Mailman doesn't quite seem happy either, despite one test message making it through, and the nameserver has vanished as well, unsurprisingly. On the other hand, it is at least running a system that plenty of people can admin, and the website is up.
I'm not sure whether the moral of this story is to delegate, or to do things properly yourself.
