Chapter 5. Some Important Events

# Chapter 5. Some Important Events

## 5.1. October 2000: Implementation of Package Pools

James Troup reported that he has been working on re-implementing the archive maintenance tools and switching to package pools. From this date, files are stored in a directory named after the corresponding source package inside of the `pools` directory. The distribution directories will only contain Packages files that contain references to the pool. This simplifies overlapping distributions such as testing and unstable. The archive is also database-driven using PostgreSQL which also speeds up lookups.

This concept of managing Debian's archives sort of like a package cache was first introduced by Bdale Garbee in this email to the debian-devel list in May of 1998.

## 5.2. November 2002: Fire burnt Debian server

Around 08:00 CET on November 20th, 2002, the University of Twente Network Operations Center (NOC) caught fire. The building burnt to the ground. The fire department gave up hope on protecting the server area. Among other things the NOC hosted satie.debian.org which contained both the security and non-US archive as well as the new-maintainer (nm) and quality assurance (qa) databases. Debian rebuilt these services on the host klecker, which was recently moved from the U.S.A. to the Netherlands.

## 5.3. November 2003: Several Debian servers hacked

Starting 17:00 UTC on November 19th, 2003, four of the project's main Web servers for bug tracking, mailing lists, security and Web searches have been compromised. The services were taken down for inspection and fortunately it could be confirmed, that the package archive was not affected by this compromise. On November 25th, all services were recovered and back online.

Chapter 4. A Detailed History |  | Chapter 6. Remembering People We Have Lost