I spent quite a bit of time working on 
fantasy today. Fantasy was the first
real linux box I set up all by myself. I had played around with linux a lot previously, especially
on powerpc. I didn't have any intel hardware at the time, so when the first powerpc distributions
came out, I was trying them out with what I had. I spent a lot of time trying to get linuxppc to
install on marginal hardware, finally got it to work pretty well on a G3. linuxppc was based mostly
on redhat, so I decided to go with redhat when was invited to set up a server for the putney school.
The plan was I would set up two servers: one would go to the Putney School and power mailing lists. The other would live with me and I could use it to test out solutions before implementing them on fantasy. The plan has worked very well, but with a few wrinkles along the way.
I set up fantasy first, made a number of mistakes, had a couple of false starts, but eventually got it working pretty well. Then I broke out the second machine, ready to do a clean, well documented install to be the server at the Putney School. The other machine wouldn't boot. It was defective and needed to be returned. So I took the first machine up, set it up, and plugged it in. We called it fantasy after a cow in the Putney dairy herd.
After a few weeks, the folks up at the Putney School asked whether or not fantasy would be up to
supporting a web mail application for students. I replied that if we got some additional RAM
and disk space, that I didn't see why not. We set up imp. Fantasy
ran. And ran. And ran. It was up for 496 days. It turned over the uptime counter. It ran
like a champ.
I sent the other machine back and got a replacement. I set it up and it has been revo. (Revo is the Esperanto word for daydream or 'reverie'.) It hasn't been as reliable as fantasy -- I think it has some marginal hardware somewhere. I tell myself that the OEM RAM module is bad. But its still been a decent server that stays up for months at a time -- A very reasonable little server.
Although revo has kept up with the times, fantasy has been living in an odd world. I kept up with security fixes, as necessary, until redhat quit supporting 5.2. Then, I just replaced packages with packages compiled from source, as necessary. Most recently, they wanted to do backups against a USB drive, so I updated everything necessary to run a 2.4 kernel and have been running with a new kernel. This weekend, there was an announcement about a security hole in apache, so I replaced apache. This broke PHP, so I replaced PHP. This broke the webmail client, so I replaced that. It probably 20 hours, all told. Now openssh has a hole. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to replace that too, but that should be easy. Then it should be good for another 500 days. :-)