GarfNet is thirty years old today
Seems as if it were only the day before yesterday, but it is in fact thirty years to the day since GarfNet had its own domain. Granted, this represents a somewhat trivial achievement on the overall scheme of things. Frankly never I really achieved all the things I hoped I would with GarfNet. Like it used to say on my old school reports, “Could do better“. However, on the other hand, I had bags of fun doing it.
Just as important I learned so much in the process. And probably more important than that, it’s been my opportunity to try to thank and perhaps even contribute toward the open source community, upon which I have relied so heavily over the last three decades. Though again, I have to admit my contribution has actually been rather small and insignificant.
GarfNet 1995-08-18 to 2025-08-18 – a learning curve
Running a remote Unix-like server encouraged me to try Linux locally. In fact I dumped windows completely way back in 2007. Never regretted it for a second. Today, all my systems, local and remote, run Debian or some derivative thereof. I also have full root access to all my remote servers. Which means that all the machines in my care share the same common Unix file system, regardless of their geographical location.
So moving data around and assigning access permissions has become merely a trivial file management exercise. Providing the internet speed is good enough, it doesn’t really matter where the machines are geographically, because they all act as one big machine. They even share the same command set. So for example, I can run a system upgrade to the remote webserver over a secure shell, just as easily as I can upgrade my local laptop.
FarceBook
As time went on, sites such as MySpace and FaceBook became a thing. I thought that GarfNet might just wither and die. After all, we don’t do “likes” or “feeds” or any of that malarkey here. However, for me, GarfNet actually became a safe alternative to American social media. Even better, in addition to not needing to wallow in the cesspit of social media, I was also able to dispense with the likes of Dropbox, WeTransfer, GoogleDocs et al. All my stuff lives on my servers, here in the UK. Granted, the main web server that hosts GarfNet is in a rack in someone else’s server farm. But it’s here in the UK and I have root!
Better still, Apache webserver is a standard part of a Debian distribution. And it’s free. Which means that setting up a webserver for local/intranet use has also become trivial too. In fact we have several local webservers running in my house. For example, one serves-up Zoneminder (security camera viewer and PVR) and WeeWx (weather and environment monitoring station), all running on a tiny 5-watt Raspberry Pi, on a shelf in my garage. Another webserver serves all the media content on our Linux media server. Importantly, I make the choice of whether any or all of this content may be viewed internally, externally and by whom.
It’s been a lot to learn and frankly I still feel I’m a total noob, with much still to learn. But the upshot of it is that today I make the decisions, regarding what happens to my data, not some foreign billionaire. And I’m determined to use GarfNet to help others do the same, should they feel so inclined. 🙂
A piece of cake
I had hoped to have a brief potted history of the site, and perhaps a bit of properly set-out rationale ready to roll for this occasion too. But a mixture of becoming somewhat diverted by nostalgia and a rather painful lower-right #8 tooth means that is not quite ready. Besides, this isn’t a time to get too maudlin. So here are some AI birthday cakes instead. Granted, like most AI images, they don’t bear too much close inspection. But AI imaging is a bit of a thing at the moment. And they did actually make me feel quite peckish as I created them!
