Title: When Apache Was Still on the Rise

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October 14, 2002 was a quiet day in my life, but looking back at it now, I can see how much tech was changing around me. The dot-com boom had been crashing for over a year by then, and Linux on the desktop was starting to gain traction. Apache was still the king of web servers, but there were whispers of change coming. Sendmail was still our go-to for email, and BIND was managing names like it owned them.

I remember that day vividly because I had just finished deploying a new application at work—a Java app running on Tomcat behind an Apache reverse proxy. It wasn’t groundbreaking, but we were proud to have made the switch from the old CGI scripts. The app handled user requests and connected to our MySQL database, which was a big step up from the Access databases we had used before.

We were using Sendmail for email delivery, and I spent most of my time tweaking Apache configurations. Apache was so ubiquitous that everyone knew it; you could ask someone if they liked Apache or not, and they would nod knowingly. That said, there were growing pains. The mod_perl module made Perl scripts run as fast as C, but it also meant that debugging Apache suddenly became a nightmare. I remember spending hours in the debugger trying to figure out why some dynamic content wasn’t showing up.

At work, we used BIND for DNS lookups and occasionally had to deal with IP address conflicts or TTL issues. It was mostly straightforward, but the sheer size of our domain made us appreciate the tool’s complexity. We were running on VMware ESX 1.0, which felt like a major upgrade from our old VMWare Player days. The early version of VMware was so barebones that we had to manually manage network settings and storage.

During my lunch break, I would often visit tech forums and read about the latest in networking, security, and development. IPv6 discussions were just starting to gain traction, but it seemed like a distant dream compared to the immediate needs for managing our existing networks. People were still talking about Y2K, mostly as a cautionary tale, but there was this undercurrent of fear that something else might cause us problems down the road.

One particularly frustrating day, we had an Apache config issue where one virtual host wasn’t serving content correctly. I spent hours pouring over the configuration files, trying to spot what could be wrong. Finally, after a coffee break and some fresh eyes, it turned out that I had accidentally commented out a crucial line in the server’s configuration file. Doh! These little mistakes are embarrassing when you’re trying to prove how experienced you are.

Back then, we were using Bash scripts for deployment, which was both cool and terrifying. We would scp files over and run shell commands on our servers. It was quick but not very secure or reliable. Looking back, it’s surprising how manual everything felt compared to today’s tools. Git didn’t really catch on at most companies yet, so we were still using Subversion for version control.

That evening, I attended a local tech meetup where some of my colleagues were discussing the state of web development. They were excited about the potential of AJAX and XMLHTTPRequests, though they admitted it was still too early to tell if these would become mainstream technologies. The buzz around Web 2.0 was just starting, but nobody knew quite what it meant yet.

Reflecting on that day now, I see how much has changed in tech since then. Apache is no longer the go-to web server; Nginx and others have taken its place. Linux on the desktop never really caught on outside of servers and embedded systems. IPv6 finally started to take off a decade later. And most importantly, we’ve come so far in terms of automation and security.

But that doesn’t mean I miss everything from 2002. There’s something to be said for the raw, hands-on experience of those days—tweaking configurations by hand, deploying apps with Bash scripts, and dealing with the limitations of the tools we had. It was a time when the internet was still new enough that you could see how it would change everything.

Today, I’m thankful for the advancements in technology, but sometimes I look back to those days with a bit of nostalgia for the old ways—simple, raw, and full of possibility.