slowass.net has always ran on inexpensive hardware, and it's never ran very well. I wish I could say that I was a first rate system admin, but I'm clearly not. First starting out in the mid 1990s running on a dedicated dial-up SLIP connection from a 386 running a pre-1.0 version of NetBSD, service glitches were expected, but what wasn't expected is that the situation wouldn't improve. slowass.net has never passed the level of reliability of NetBSD 0.9 dialed up over a modem.
The last foray ("God, I hope this fixes the crashing") was OpenBSD on Sparc. OpenBSD on Sparc wedges up in exactly the same way that NetBSD 1.6.1 on Sparc was for a client of mine. Upgrading to 1.6.2 fixed the problem, but then NetBSD later introduced serious bugs into the code base and has all but refused to fix them leaving no upgrade path beyond 1.6.2. I guess I should actually sit down and read the changesets for 1.6.2 and figure out what fixed and bundle up a patch for the OpenBSD folks.
The alternative is to ditch RISC and put this Via 800 in a small case and declare that to be the new slowass.net, and run FreeBSD 2.2.8 or perhaps the latest in the 4.x branch, right before FreeBSD completely screwed their codebase.
By the way, moving all of slowass.net to a new machine is a *lot* of work...
Besides starting on a 386, it was on a 486 for a while, then an AMD K6-II, then the Mac. It ran FreeBSD for a while there, and FreeBSD 2.2.7 was the last operating system I've worked with that I'd describe as "bulletproof". The temptation is strong to just start ignoring all of the "progress".
-scott
