On March 19, 2005, NagiosQL arrived on SourceForge. Martin of wizonet put on the web what Nagios administrators had been doing in vim: host, service, contact, timeperiod, template — in a form, in MySQL, with a button to write to disk and another to run nagios -v. Twenty-one years later, version 3.5.0 still … Read more
On March 14, 1999, Ethan Galstad released NetSaint 0.0.1. He thought about a dozen people would care. It pinged hosts, ran plugins, sent email and pager alerts when a service went down — and again when it recovered. In 2002, the name became Nagios: “Nagios Ain’t Gonna Insist On Sainthood,” hagios = saint, … Read more
On October 8, 2011, Dmitriy Zaporozhets made GitLab’s first commit. His home in Ukraine had no running water; the community well was the smaller problem — what he lacked was a Git tool he could change. Ruby on Rails, inspired by GitWeb, built with Valeriy Sizov. Fifteen years later, GitLab 19.3.1 … Read more
In July 2002, a Finnish developer who had already written irssi released an IMAP server designed to be neither Courier nor UW. He called it Dovecot — a shelter for pigeons. Five years later, on April 13, 2007, version 1.0.0 arrived. Timo Sirainen noted: “almost five years, but it is ready.” Twenty-four … Read more
In 1997, Wietse Venema at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center began writing an MTA so he would not have to live with Sendmail. On December 14, 1998, the code was released. It was called VMailer, then IBM Secure Mailer, then Postfix — “post” for mail, “fix” for repair. Twenty-eight years later, Postfix … Read more
In March 2013, during a five-minute lightning talk at PyCon in Santa Clara, Solomon Hykes showed what dotCloud used underneath its PaaS. Its name was Docker. On March 20, the code was released. In June 2014, version 1.0 arrived. Thirteen years later, Docker Engine 29.8.0 (September 3 … Read more
On June 6, 2014, Joe Beda made the first public commit of what would become Kubernetes: 250 files and 47,501 lines of Go, Bash, and Markdown. Four days later, Eric Brewer announced the project at DockerCon. A year later, on July 21, 2015, version 1.0 arrived — and Google announced that … Read more
In Brazil in the 2000s, putting Linux on the desktop still meant facing partitioning, LILO, and English-language forums. Carlos Eduardo Morimoto da Silva — the person behind Guia do Hardware — decided to do the opposite: a live CD in Portuguese, with KDE and “magic icons” that installed everything with one click, all fitting on a mini-CD … Read more
On April 29, 2005, two Linux developers in Vienna, Dietmar and Martin Maurer, released Proxmox Mail Gateway and registered the GmbH. Three years later came Virtual Environment: OpenVZ + KVM, a browser, Debian. In 2026, Proxmox VE 9.2 (May 21) runs kernel 7.0, QEMU 11, and LXC 7 … Read more
XCP was the free XenServer ISO. Citrix opened up the product in 2013, and XCP died on the wiki. In 2017, the Free edition lost live storage, dynamic memory, and GPU features. Olivier Lambert of Vates launched a Kickstarter, called it XCP-ng — next generation — and on March 31, 2018, released 7.4. The … Read more
