My website is hosted by Dreamhost, currently on a server named “tucana” (previously on “hi-c”, RIP).  Two weeks ago tucana had a couple of outages.  These were definitely longer than I’m used to, but I more than get what I pay for with Dreamhost – if I were selling services I would be using a coloed server.  For the money I pay, a 24 hour outage every 2-3 years is actually pretty good.

So I wasn’t too terribly put out by the outage – I had local backups from the night before.  I sat back to wait it out.  It came back up with (mostly) all of my files(*) and I was happy.  But they made one small change that I noticed immediately – they changed the “font” of the server name in the motd file.

Here’s the old banner:

  _                          
 | |_ _  _ __ __ _ _ _  __ _ 
 |  _| || / _/ _` | ' \/ _` |
  \__|\_,_\__\__,_|_||_\__,_|
                             
 Welcome to tucana.dreamhost.com

And here’s the new banner:

  |                             
   _| |  |  _|  _` |   \   _` | 
 \__|\_,_|\__|\__,_|_| _|\__,_| 
                                
 Welcome to tucana.dreamhost.com

I noted it and then moved on, but my brain can’t let it go.  Every time I log in I notice that the banner is different.  I’m really ready for my brain to stop caring about this…

(*) Everything in my home directory was found and current, but, since they put a new OS on the server, my crontab was missing.  They eventually restored one, but it was several weeks old.  Fortunately at some point I started dumping it into my home directly every night so it would get picked up by my backups – whew!