Sysadmining like it's 2009 - ((lambda (x) (create x)) '(knowledge))

Sysadmining like it's 2009

2026 legacy lab summer camp plan ·

May 31, 2026

I'm wicked excited, it's finally here! Legacy Labs is officially starting its first ever event! For the next two months I'm going to be sysadmining like it's 2009, well sort of, I'll break down my full plan here in a second and it's a little bit anachronistic but there's a reasoning behind it. But I'm getting ahead of myself, you probably already have a couple of questions, like what is legacy labs exactly? And "I thought summer camps were for kids, what?".

What is a Legacy Lab?

For the last 5 years I've participated every summer in a group event called the OCC or Old Computer Challenge. The premise on the surface was always very simple, for a week we'd all get together and constrain ourselves to a low end low resourced computer and see how much we could do with it. I had an absolute blast doing this, and it turned into this thing I looked forward to every single summer where I got an excuse to use some old long forgotten hardware or try an esoteric operating system in earnest. I wasn't super heavily involved in the community necessarily, but despite that I was very invested in the idea surrounding it.

For me, the OCC signaled a week in which I got to explore something for the sake of exploring it and nothing further. The point was to learn by trying something strange.

The last year I participated the "challenge" was simply that there was no challenge, and that honestly resonates a bit. I daily drove a Motorola Droid 4 with Alpine Linux as my primary computer for 7-8 years simply because I could. The idea that the challenges weren't challenging was something that resonated with me deeply. So I tried to go over the top with my participation. But I faced time constraints and set backs because of my off the wall ideas, and the uphill struggle it can be working with old unreliable hardware and long abandoned systems. Because of that struggle my last OCC also devolved in to essentially "setup and fix Windows vista" which wasn't really what I wanted to do with my time.

So Legacy Labs is my attempt to provide a space more tailored towards what I want to do. Instead of picking a single week where we get together and try to force ourselves to use dial up speeds, 1/2gb of ram, or a specific operating system; we provide 2 months to pick any retro-computing/permacomputing topic/s that interest you and encourage you to go deep with them. Really dig in and figure out how things work, why they were designed the way they were, the history behind the systems that exist. Intentionally creating a space for my own curiosity and desire to exist.

How you personally go about doing that exploration isn't the important part. For example, this year I'll be doing a deep dive on Windows Server 2008 core, but I'm not going to be running everything under Hyper-V. I'll setup a Hyper-V server sure, but it's not so much about shoving myself into this anachronistic world and pretending like I'm back in 2009 as a solo sysadmin. I lived that through, purposefully chose to hone Linux skills professionally, I just want to learn more about the core variant of Windows frankly. So my hypervisor in my lab will be Incus, something inherently modern and a tool I use professionally. I think, personally, this invites greater flexibility and freedom of creativity for people to explore whatever they want to explore.

Maybe as LLSC evolves we'll do more thematic exploration as a group, but for our very first summer camp the only guidance I have is be curious! Whatever your criteria of "retro" or "perma" or "computing" might be is good enough to satisfy me and I look forward to any and all contributions!

Which brings us round nicely to what I'm doing for the next couple of months.

Vista, Server 2008, and other crazy ideas

A couple of my close friends are already aware of this, but I have a bit of a thing for Windows Vista. It's an objectively terribly operating system. I remember HATING it vehemently. But I kind of owe Vista my career in a sense. You see, one of the first times I really applied my Linux foo and solved real world problems was replacing Vista with Ubuntu to save a friends laptop. I got to learn so much about debugging wireless driver issues on both Vista, and then Ubuntu, and later how to configure WINE to get things like CIV and the Sims running under Ubuntu once Vista had been purged with prejudice. I'm really kind of fond of it in retrospect.

And thanks to last year's OCC I have this super sweet well configured Vista netbook that oddly enough sips power and breezes along on a single gig of ram. It's so wildly lightweight that it makes the under powered x86 atom CPU seem powerful. And I'm unfortunately aware of how under powered it is, having used an OCC to debug SBCL build errors. Despite that fact it runs Emacs and I can compile most of my Nim programs on it, and between...