Resurrecting GLaDOS

After a little over five years, the small form factor desktop computer I built back in late 2012 refused to boot properly. For a couple of months, I resisted–I have a work-issue Macbook and iPad Pro, and I don’t play nearly as many computer games as I used to. It didn’t feel all that necessary for me to have a desktop on top of all of that.

But, it turns out, it’s really quite nice to have a computer setup of your own. I ended up cannibalizing many of the parts from that desktop into a new, mid-tower sized box with 8th-generation Intel technology. And it’s actually really nice! At work, my Linux desktop is also running a circa 2013 CPU, so I legitimately didn’t know how much faster and more power-efficient desktop computers have gotten in the last half-decade.

For the past couple of years, I’ve kept a box in DelimiterVPS’s Atlanta data center named angercore.aeturnalus.com. For just $20 a month, I had a (very old) HP BL260C blade server with plenty of disk space and RAM to run many of my random experimental projects on.

Unfortunately, angercore.aeturnalus.com has been offline for over three weeks, and it’s not looking like it will come back anytime soon.

C:\Users\Robert Ying>ping angercore.aeturnalus.com

Pinging angercore.aeturnalus.com [199.233.247.142] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from 69.174.12.218: Destination host unreachable.

Ping statistics for 199.233.247.142:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

So, I guess it’s time to say goodbye. If I’m really lucky I’ll manage to get some of the data that lived on the box back, but I’m not holding out hope.