For nearly 10 years, all my home internet traffic has flowed through the capable interfaces of Nitrogen.  Through the years linux routing grew increasingly more powerful, but this little Dimension PC did not.  It’s 700Mhz Celeron CPU and PCI network interfaces (literally nothing onboard) had always met my needs.  However in these times of ever increasing speeds, i began to wonder.  After a few pesky error messages, “eth0: Too much work at interrupt” i knew it was time for an upgrade.  From ipfwadm through ipchains, and eventually to iptables, this unit continued to teach me the linux kernel firewall.   QOS, Network monitoring, intrusion detection, even Tor’s anonymous proxy relay, we’d been through it all together.  What am i going to do with him now? Replaced with a newer (but far from new) PC.  Rebuilt from the ground up to be tighter, faster, and i don’t even mind saying… prettier.  Now i have Phosphorus.  Nitrogen will receive the most honorable sendoff i can give it.  To be stripped of its few remaining useful parts and recycled.  No moment of silence for this one.  It was recognized with a 5 minute internet blackout.  While i reset my cable modem.