It’s with sadness that I report the passing of phantom.eri.uct.ac.za, the first net-connected Linux system that I had an account on :-( The department that used phantom as its mail server decided to move over to the main UCT mail server, resulting in phantom being decomissioned.

From what I’ve been told, phantom began life sometime in 1994 or early 1995 as a small Linux server in the Energy Research Instititute at UCT (now part of the Energy Research Centre). Thanks to Stephen Tjasink, I got an account in mid-1995, if memory serves me correctly. I started using the machine (then a 486/50 with 8M RAM and a 250M disk) for my mail and to host my home page. After a while, I got root and began assisting with the sysadmin tasks (Travers Waker was the official admin in those days). I remember the heady days of converting from aout to ELF, installing perl 5 and rebuilding the NCSA httpd :) At around this time, phantom slowly started becoming more important, hosting POP accounts for staff in addition to the department website.

In late 1997, some time after Travers left and had been replaced by Edward van Kuik, phantom got a hardware upgrade and became a Pentium MMX 187 (overclocked!) with 128M and 2.5G disk. It was also migrated from Slackware 2.2 to Redhat 4.0.

Edward later left and was replaced by Geoffrey Crowe. I continued to assist with sysadmin tasks and by then the department was using phantom for all its mail. In 1999, Geoffrey’s replacement, Darren Ravens, managed to find money for an additional disk and phantom gained an additional 8.4G and was migrated to Debian.

By 2003, phantom had been upgraded to a 1.7Ghz Celeron with 256M RAM and the following year gained two 80G drives running in a RAID1 array. It also started doing virus scanning of emails and had some pretty good anti-spam measures in place. Sadly, the writing was on the wall when Darren left in late 2004, and phantom was finally decomissioned this week.

With phantom’s demise, so dies my oldest active email address: mj@phantom.eri.uct.ac.za.