Finally, I think the time has come to put my old, trusty server echtelion to rest. Although the hardware has been slightly changed over the years, and the names switched time and time again, echtelion is still the first server I ever got up and running with Linux.

Starting out with Slackware, and ending up with Gentoo for the last two years or so, echtelion has been with me all this time. Faithfully providing file sharing via Samba, web pages with Apache, mail with qmail, IRC with irssi, databases with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and plenty of other things.

But the file sharing has been taken over by my file server, anduin.

I don’t really host any web pages any longer, the only things are taken care of by the development server, maeglin, and eastblue.org, using a shared webhost.

I’ve already ended up with a MySQL instance on maeglin, so I can just move all the databases over there.

And as mentioned in “Summer”, I’ve moved over to Google Apps for my email.

Which only leaves IRC. And frankly, that’s not worth a dedicated machine.

I still have Apache running, faithfully serving up things for northblue.org, but that is so empty that I could easily move it over to maeglin, which would also let me drop Pound from the firewall and just send everything over to maeglin.

Since the file server is meant to accompany me whenever I go to a LAN party or something like that, I’m a bit reluctant to have things other than Samba and NFS running there, so it looks like maeglin will be my IRC box as well from now on.

Another thing that this simplifies, is SSH. I usually want to end up on the IRC box when logging in, so I have the SSH port forwarded there. But it also happens that I want to push some changes to a repository when I’m on the outside, so I have to use different ports. No more!