February 18th, 2002. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I can still remember the smell of the office, the hum of old machines, and the ever-present stress of keeping our systems up and running. We were in the middle of what felt like the aftermath of the dot-com boom—reeling from the bubble’s burst but somehow holding on to the hope that we could make it through this transitional period.

At work, we were still using Sendmail for email, Apache for our web servers, and BIND for DNS. These technologies had become so ubiquitous that they seemed like the foundation of our entire online world. Yet, as Y2K receded into memory, there was a sense of unease. Would these systems hold up under the pressure of an increasingly complex and interconnected internet?

I remember sitting in front of my desk one Monday morning, staring at the logs on one of our Apache servers. The server was complaining about DNS issues—specifically, about resolving a hostname that seemed to be pointing to nowhere. It was frustrating because it was just one more thing we needed to worry about while trying to keep all the other systems running smoothly.

I tried to trace the problem by pinging the hostname from my workstation, but got no response. I knew DNS was flaky at best and often a source of headaches, so I decided to dive deeper into the logs. The culprit turned out to be an old BIND configuration that had been quietly causing issues for months. With some quick editing and a restart, everything seemed to work again.

But this wasn’t the only challenge we faced. VMware was still in its early stages, but it was clear that virtualization would play a big part in our future. We were experimenting with setting up virtual machines on a couple of old servers to see if they could handle more load than our physical systems. It was a wild ride, with constant crashes and reboots, but we kept pushing forward.

One day, I found myself arguing with my team about whether we should switch from Sendmail to Postfix. Some were convinced that Postfix was better in every way—more stable, less prone to bugs, easier to manage. Others felt that sticking with Sendmail was the safer bet given its widespread use and robust community support.

The debate got heated as I tried to make my case for moving to Postfix. “Postfix is just more modern,” I argued, pointing out its cleaner codebase and better security features. But others were wary of change, worried about potential downtime during the transition. We decided to take a cautious approach, setting up Postfix in parallel with Sendmail to see how it would hold up.

Looking back, that decision was probably premature. The change ended up causing more problems than it solved initially, but we learned valuable lessons about version control and testing before making such shifts. Those lessons stayed with me as I moved on to other projects.

The year 2002 was a time of patching and praying. We were constantly fixing things, hoping that our infrastructure would hold up against the challenges thrown at it by an increasingly complex internet. While some of the technologies we used have since been replaced by newer ones, the lessons I learned back then—about resilience, adaptability, and the importance of understanding the tools you use—are still as relevant today as they were two decades ago.

As February 18th slipped into March, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief. The dot-com bubble had burst, but we were holding on to what mattered: our commitment to delivering reliable services despite all the challenges that came with it. And who knows? Maybe some of those systems and technologies from back then still underpin parts of our current infrastructure today.

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That’s my 2002 in a nutshell—patching, praying, and hoping we could make it through another day without everything falling apart.