front matter
preface
I’m scavenging through shelves of discarded hardware in the basement of the old government building, when a pair of sturdy-looking hard drives catch my attention. The year is 2002, and I’m 19 years old and working my first job as a help desk technician at a French tax-collection agency. My boss almost apologizes when she asks me to clean up the basement, thinking I’ll loathe the assignment, but I feel like Ali Baba when he first entered the magical cave. So many old servers, sitting there unused but still ready to run UNIX systems I’ve never heard of, let alone played with. If my apartment were bigger than a single bedroom and a tiny kitchen, I’d take it all and run a huge network at home!
The two hard drives are 15,000 RPM SCSI drives that belonged to an already-old domain controller. I put them aside and look for an SCSI card to plug them into. I find it in a nearby box, dusty but intact. After several hours of cleaning and inventorying, I ask for permission to take them home with me. My plan is simple: plug them into a spare motherboard I already have and build the fastest Counter Strike (the shooting game) server the internet has ever seen. Then I’ll put it on the internet, using my freshly installed 512 Kbps DSL connection, and invite my gaming crew to train there.