Re:Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive
by mprovost on Thursday July 02, 2020 @04:52PM
(#23717924)
I think you're looking back at this from the modern perspective of cheap hardware and open source software. We didn't have Sun workstations as desktops - we were using FreeBSD on cheap Dells. Our production servers cost something like $200k each. And the http server cost money - we didn't have licenses to run copies locally. These days you can just run things in Docker and have a reproducible environment but it wasn't that easy back then.
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I have been sysadmin at that time.
Usually, HTTP servers would be huge bloats of configuration running on huge machines. As a sysadmin, it was not typically feasible to replicate the configuration on the local machine.
With a static website nobody would figure you can accidentally actually do something harmful to the website. The worst thing that could happen was that you made a configuration error in which case you just rolled back the config.
Of course we were supposed to have backups in case the server failed. While the servers would typically use RAID arrays we knew it would not save against rm -fr so there was a backup but backups rarely could be restored instantly.
Interesting. I never thought it was so complicated to run the http server. What was the bottleneck that prevented them from running locally? The memory used by all the config?