STILL OFFLINE

Well Aussies.space is still offline over a month since it was 
planned to be online again "at the latest". In fact the Gopher and 
SFTP servers have been down completely this weekend. I was thinking 
that the Gopher server going down from time to time was an 
indication that work was still going on behind the scenes, but now 
I'm wondering whether the new system is just extremely unstable. 
Still I don't feel like I can really complain because I'm the only 
person who seemed to be actively using and updating their Gopher 
pages on Aussies.space, and nobody seemed to be doing much with the 
web hosting either, so there's probably a good argument for the 
"well go set up your own tilde then" response if I went nagging. 
Plus the only email I have for Fosslinux is @aussies.space anyway.

It would really be pretty easy to just get a Gopher server running 
somewhere myself, and wouldn't cost me anything either, but I 
really don't like the idea of the IP address pointing right back to 
my real ID, even if that info is only known by the hosting 
provider. Trying to use a fake ID or pay for a VPS host that works 
completely anonymously is taking it all too far. Of course the easy 
option is to switch to another tilde, and I always had eyeblea.ch 
earmarked as a back-up in case aussies.space disappeared. In spite 
of the TLD, it claimed to be another Australian tilde, so no 
horrible intercontinental SSH lag, and it has stuck around all the 
time I've had my Gopher hole. _Until_ now, where it's just coming 
back "host name not found". The domain is still registered to 
someone, but there's nothing behind it anymore. All things 
considered, it looks suspiciously like they were both being run by 
the same guy.

OK so there are lots of other tildes/pubnixes, if aussies.space 
doesn't come back soon I guess I'll find another one easily enough. 
I can't really be bothered right now though.

In the world of Usenet there's something similar with the 
public-access server Aioe.org going down, and a few other news 
servers such as mixmin.net apparantly breaking as well at the same 
time (I'm thinking they were probably poorly configured and 
unmaintained, so couldn't cope with being unable to peer to 
Aioe.org). There seems to have been one email from the admin 
complaining of a RAID controller failure and then radio silence. 
That's another thing where it's hard to explain how it can take a 
month to restore services unless the whole thing's just been put in 
the too-hard basket. Rumours of poor health or poverty have been 
circulating, but I wonder if it's just the case that declining 
usage made the admin question whether it was worth the effort. The 
sad thing is that it's sure to have cut off yet more Usenet users 
who might not bother to find another news server. Another small 
step in the decline towards NNTP-silence.

Solderpunk posted some complaints about the poor attitude of the 
SDF admins years ago, which combined with the fact that SDF are one 
of the oldest surviving pubnix services (and the oldest that still 
offers properly-working Gopher hosting), served to reinforce a 
suspicion of mine that one-man-show type free services survive 
longest if the one-man is actually a bit of a jerk. I'll admit to 
being cynical here, but I feel like the warm fuzzys of offering a 
free service to stangers only really motivate someone for a few 
years, maybe a decade. Eventually they either get bored, or their 
circumstances change, and they just stop caring, because they no 
longer feel like they're getting anything back from it. But if it 
allows them some sort of power trip where they get to choose sides, 
lay down the rules, and make their users grovel at their feet, 
that's what keeps them motivated to keep the service running. It's 
their own little empire in a box. A rack-mounted, Intel 
Xeon-powered, box.

On the other hand if such an admin actually gets into a position of 
power in their real life, then they'll probably lose interest too. 
So basically what I'm saying is that if you want a long-lasting 
non-commercial online service, find one run by a power-craved jerk 
whose life is a failure. But I'll probably just stick to the 
short-lived services, lasting so long as they can ride on the back 
of their admin's warm-fuzzies.

 - The Free Thinker

P.S. I keep messing up my system for saving these posts beacuse I'm 
not doing the final step of uploading them. Break one habit and 
everything else falls apart, as is usual for me. It's going to be a 
real pain to sort these out when I do finally have a chance to put 
them online.