Have you ever wondered what a security probe of a computer sounded like? I’d guess probably not, because on the face of it that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But there was a time when I could very clearly discern the sound of a computer being scanned. It sounded like a small mechanical heart beat: Click-click… click-click… click-click… Prior to 2010, I had a computer under my desk with what at the time were not unheard-of properties: Its storage was based on a stack of spinning metal platters (a now-antiquated device known as a “hard drive”), and it had a publicly routable IPv4 address with an unfiltered connection to the Internet.

Join Microsoft to celebrate Debian 8 at LinuxFest Northwest

minas.morgul.net is the hub of much of my digital life. It also provides services for quite a few friends, ranging from backup DNS to mailing lists and IRC. It lives in a datacenter 3000 miles away from where I live, with conditioned power, climate control, etc. It’s got redundant power supplies, RAID disks, remote console, and most of the other stuff you’d expect from a machine that’s supposed to be up and running non-stop.