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Comment by nasalgoat | Hacker News Reader

Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't changed since the 90's that still generate revenue, so they'll never be shut off until there's a flood or a 40MB hard drive finally dies.

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Have to admit, that approach makes a lot of sense to me. It's still chugging along and bringing in $, so why not just have a policy of benevolent neglect?

That Pentium-90 is probably sucking a ton of power at this point, when it could be virtualized and you could run 50 of those boxes on an $800 Dell pizza box. I mean, they are literally running the same hardware from the 90s.

That Pentium 90 is a 9W processor. Even after accounting for the inefficiency of a 90's era PSU, there's not much power to be saved.

Plus the hard drive(s), the space it's taking up in the DC, the cooling overhead, etc.

There's not really any significant room for improvement on any of those factors. You might be able to save a rack unit or two, and several watts by replacing hard drives with a SSD, but if you don't have 50 boxes to consolidate, you're still facing the baseline cost of having a box taking up some amount of physical space and requiring several watts of power. Unless you make the much bigger up-front investment of migrating to a shared hosting platform.

When I last saw it, it was one site per tower box. So one rack held about 8-10 individual sites.

OK you're gonna save $X / year, how many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move?

How many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move from a broken box, a faulty hard-drive and/or there's a non-updateable security vulnerability on the system running on the boxes?

I don't know, a couple of 8-hour days?

Just to make a backup alone is worth it. Did I forget to mention none of it is documented or backed up properly?

I had a good backups business for adult websites going around 2008. It was nothing more than rsync over ssh with a couple duplicates and I would burn some dvds and drop them in the post once a month. Was a very good business. Probably still viable, because those companies valued having physically possessable images of their config files and source code.

But touching it could break it. Sometimes it's best to let it run its course.

Until it dies and you start over from scratch.

I am from the adult industry. They are notorious for having that "welp, server harddrive failed, need to rebuild from scratch" mentality.

Never quite expected these words to be typed on my keyboard, but the porn industry is something I'd like to read a tech article about.

I've read in passing that in times past they were web technology pioneers. Seem to remember some were using Freebsd when the canonical approach was Sun etc. big iron and UNIX(TM), and Linux was perhaps not quite yet mature enough.

From what I've read, the adult industry (or, more generally, the human desire to have porn) has pioneered technology in general. I can't recall the source, but I recall reading something that said that most, if not all visual media were used for porn almost immediately after their inception.

I think porn is also something where your architecture only needs to just work, so that encourages cutting corners and occasionally creative solutions.

>From what I've read, the adult industry (or, more generally, the human desire to have porn) has pioneered technology in general. I can't recall the source, but I recall reading something that said that most, if not all visual media were used for porn almost immediately after their inception.

no kidding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines

" Various figurines exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva. In contrast, arms and feet are often absent, and the head is usually small and faceless.

The original cultural meaning and purpose of these artifacts is not known. It has frequently been suggested that they may have served a ritual or symbolic function. "

yep :) Imagine an archaeologist in the year 3000 looking at backups of our days Internet and wondering what "ritual or symbolic function" all those images and videos played...

If you think shared hosting and PHP are pioneering, then sure. But no, the adult industry doesn't pioneer much after about 2001.

Until you're running systems that are actually too old to find anyone who will maintain them, or repair them when they inevitably break.

I remember upgrading a bunch of this stuff in the mid to late 00s. Likely nothing that I upgraded to then modern standards using Python 2.6 and PHP 5.x has seen an update. At the time, it was actually hard to upgrade to PHP 5 or anything other than PHP 4 or Perl 5 because so many sites were using shared hosting that only support PHP4/Perl5 + MySQL.

There's a couple hundred PHP 4.4 sites running on our shared hosting. We're probably never going to upgrade them.

Did some work for a mammary related business many years ago.

A periodic job was to go through "Lois'" inbox, and clean it out. It seems their payment frontend simply generated an email for the backend payment processor (Lois). Presumably, she manually keyed the cc info into a physical xon terminal to process payments. There were usually 10s of thousands of messages consisting only of credit card info sitting in the clear for months at a stretch.

It was FreeBSD though, so they were cool in my book :)

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