A few months ago we announced that the US Maven Central server had been moved over to a virtual system.
In the natural course of machine rotations, I had some out of warranty machines de-racked, packaged up and sent from the Contegix datacenter to our headquarters in Silver Spring, MD.
When I was unboxing them it dawned on me for the first time that I was laying eyes on a machine so many people have relied upon for years and yet had been so far unseen. Well here it is:
A few facts about Central during the time it was hosted on the machine you see here (3/2007 - 3/2011):
It boggles my mind to think about how many applications both commercial and open source contain bits fetched from this singular machine. Now that we have 2 machines in the UK and 2 VMs floating across 6 hosts in the US, there can never be a single machine in the future we can gaze upon and say "that was Central."