When I started writing my entry on the persistence of 'san' names over several generations of our fileservers, I believed that we'd considered our iSCSI environment to be 'not a real SAN', with the last real SAN we operated being our pre-ZFS Fibre Channel environment. A large part of it was that this was how I thought about those old fileserver generations now, at this distance from them; I felt that our iSCSI environment was kind of a pseudo-SAN. When I actually read what we'd written at the time, this was very much not the case. We routinely talked about having a 'SAN' (or two of them), both in our worklogs and in my entries on our first generation fileservers and our second generation fileservers. Regardless of whether I'd call our iSCSI environment a 'real SAN' today, we clearly thought of it as a real SAN back in the days.

What I think happened is straightforward; I took my current, not entirely thought out image of our iSCSI fileserver environment and projected it backward to assume that it was how we thought about things at the time. The moral I take from this is that while I may be able to remember past factual things with reasonable accuracy, I'm probably not going to be accurate about what we thought about them. Feelings and attitudes are much more fungible and mercurial, and it's much easier to unthinkingly project my current views back in time in a way that I know I can't do with, say, the hardware and software environment.

One reasonable work-around for this is to do an end of service writeup of systems and then remember to check it later. This writeup will reflect and perhaps explicitly include our attitudes and views as of the end of the system's life, while it's still vivid in our minds and our attitudes probably haven't shifted. If our attitudes have shifted, we're likely to be conscious of that and the shift itself is worth writing about in the end of service writeup, because it means that we had some sort of realization after shutting down the system and getting just a little bit of distance from it.

(There's also writing explicit retrospectives a bit after you've shut something down, eg, or after you've been running something for a while, eg.)