A piece of me in every corner of the internet

╶── gemlog · 2026-09-24

I was looking through the servers I manage, and it’s kind of amazing how many different pieces of software, systems, and random projects I’ve left scattered around.

A lot of them were things I built and never came back to. Others were things I installed, got working, and simply never looked at again. I just left them there, drifting.

They were experiments more than passions.

Recently, I became obsessed with understanding how Usenet works, and before I knew it, I was building my own server. I knew I’d probably never actually use it, but I wanted to understand it. To be more precise, I was hungry to learn.

You can even visit it here: https://skull.black

https://skull.black

But Skull Black wasn’t what made me write this post.

What did was a visit to a little Intel NUC from 2019, quietly sitting there, dusty and hidden away in a corner of my rack. Almost invisible on the bottom shelf, except for the little RJ45 light still blinking away.

I decided to check what was running on it and, to my surprise, found a ghostly little IRC network still alive at `irc.skull.black`.

I also found a Mumble server at `voice.skull.black`, and an XMPP server running Prosody on some domain left over from some old idea or forgotten experiment.

Maybe it’s finally time to inventory my infrastructure.

──╴ end of transmission

Gemlog

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