Turns out there is a cron job that updates the locate command's index.
We wrote it on the LAMP stack which gave us the full suite of whatever you could find on a Linux CD at the time.
Fancy graphs? No problem.
Send reminder emails? Sure boss! We dutifully started hacking and testing and hacking to get that function in.
To test, we decided to send emails to jackfrost, santa, and so on from our own sendmail server to the corporate mail server. It worked fine because we weren’t spamming it, we were just sending a few messages every now and then as we debugged.
Turns out there’s really a Jack Frost that worked for us.
He was not pleased.
We were amused.
I think we apologized, and I forget how we figured out he was a real person.
The problem was that I only had mechanical hard drives back then and they would spin up all the time and make noise.
In 2001 I started to systematically search for the causes of the disk noises and document it at https://www.agol.dk/quietlinux/
E.g., I spent a lot of time finding out that CUPS was generating a new certificate every 5 minutes. Nowadays it is a lot easier to investigate things like that. Back then I was patching the kernel.
Well. Hacked as in someone banging their password list against an SSH server that only accepts public key logins, at maximum speed with tens of simultaneous connections, pegging the CPU (and I was running junk hardware, I found that 800MHz Intel Coppermine CPU literally from a mixed waste trash bin). Usually the scripts doing this had the decency to keep the attempts to something like 1 per second which would be unnoticeable.
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