#128
Linode ID
2003 — 2026
Here rested Linode #128, provisioned in Dallas on 15 July 2003, weeks after Linode itself began selling them — back when a Linode was a User Mode Linux process on a shared box. Its configuration profile still said Debian 3.0r1 on the day it was switched off.
The virtualisation was swapped out from under it twice, to Xen in 2008 and to KVM in 2015, and it never noticed. It was upgraded in place to Debian 5 “lenny” and stayed there for seventeen years. It served a wedding video, a church website, a telephone exchange, and two hundred thousand other things nobody asked it for. It carried a 256 MB swap disk, sized two-to-one against the memory it had in 2003, and never once mounted it. Its filesystem was last checked in 2011. It never complained.
Nine months into this machine’s life, in April 2004, Christopher Aker — caker — wrapped a token bucket filter around User Mode Linux’s asynchronous block driver. On a host shared by dozens of these, one neighbour with a runaway find could sink everyone else, and there was no other lever. So disk operations were made to cost something. One I/O, one token. You were refilled 512 a second, you could burst against whatever had accumulated in the bucket, and when the bucket hit zero the disk simply stopped being fast. Best of all, you could read your own balance:
Empty it often enough and someone lowered your refill by hand for a few days until you learned. Xen took the patch away in 2008 and handed everyone CFQ and ionice instead, which was better in every way except the one that mattered: nothing since has been so legible. One file, one cat, and you knew exactly how much machine you had left.
The machine is gone. The bytes are not.