The Quake Server

Da_Man

It was in the good ol' days of the dot.com era - I worked as a web programmer for this really sleek web- and design agency: that is, not much pay, but lots of great parties. Cool chicks, too.. well, not too bad altogether, at least in the memory.

One day there, we got our very own web server. Well, we needed one, to test drive these pages, so I think this was a good idea. The admins, of course, wanted a Linux server, the management heard that Windows NT is all the hype. We got an NT server. First thing the admins did was to install Debian (and never told the management). Well, I didn't care, the server worked, and that's all I was interested in.

Or did it? Strangely enough, while I could access the server quite well from the office (and obviously none of our clients had any problems to access it) I simply couldn't check it out from at home in the eveing. It was either "Server not found" or "Timeout". So there must be something wrong with my network connection, obvously.

So one day I was doing long hours in the office and shortly after everybody (most notably the management) left the office, the web server was suddenly down again. So I walked over to the admins to ask them to check. Hm, nobody there? I checked the server room - there they are: all playing Quake - on our web server. As they did almost every evening.

Well, at least that explains... :-)

belgariontheking

Sounds like a pretty good deal. They didn't tell you that the parties were LAN parties, did they?

ArieLex

All playing Quake. On the server. In the server room. That's a WTF indeed... ;-)

WWWWolf

@Da' Man said:

all playing Quake - on our web server.

Paraphrased from an old, old computer joke book, an email from the Boss: "...for example, the Support refused to install the NHL game to my computer, while it is well known that the Support Department uses our Clustered Server Solution - a rather pricey investment, too - to play Quake."

I've sometimes wondered how parallelisable the QW server is (though obviously, I wouldn't know why)...

niteice

@WWWWolf said:

@Da' Man said:
I've sometimes wondered how parallelisable the QW server is (though obviously, I wouldn't know why)...

As soon as a device capable of displaying graphics and performing floating-point math can run user-supplied code, Doom is generally the application of choice to port.

That could be the new server test. Every time you get a new high-powered server, you host a game of Quake on it.

AbbydonKrafts

@niteice said:

As soon as a device capable of displaying graphics and performing floating-point math can run user-supplied code, Doom is generally the application of choice to port.

That's the running gag I see on Engadget. Anytime a new computer (or similar device) is mentioned, one of the initial replies will be:

But will Doom run on it?

(or a variant thereof)

Eternal_Density

@AbbydonKrafts said:

Anytime a new computer (or similar device) is mentioned, one of the initial replies will be:
But will Doom run on it?

(or a variant thereof)

It's "Does it play Doom?" (or "Will it Blend?", and don't forget to welcome our future robot overlords.)

AbbydonKrafts

@Eternal Density said:

don't forget to welcome our future robot overlords.

That's where I got the idea for the tag I used in another thread.

Carnildo

@Eternal Density said:

@AbbydonKrafts said:
Anytime a new computer (or similar device) is mentioned, one of the initial replies will be:

But will Doom run on it?

(or a variant thereof)
It's "Does it play Doom?" (or "Will it Blend?", and don't forget to welcome our future robot overlords.)

On Slashdot, the question would be "But does it run Linux?"