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<html><head><title>The Very Long Night of Midwinter.com</title><map name="toplevel"><area shape="RECT" coords="0,0,99,23" href="/lurk/universe/intro.html" alt="Universe"><area shape="RECT" coords="100,0,199,23" href="/lurk/episodes.php" alt="Episodes"><area shape="RECT" coords="200,0,299,23" href="/lurk/making/creators.html" alt="People"><area shape="RECT" coords="300,0,399,23" href="/lurk/resources/online.html" alt="Resources"><area shape="RECT" coords="400,0,499,23" href="/lurk/reference/episodes.html" alt="Encyclopedia"><area shape="RECT" coords="0,24,499,31" nohref></map>
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<h1>What the heck happened to Midwinter?</h1>
<p>How can a site vanish for such a long time?  Read on for a brief summaryof what happened.
<p>The Midwinter Web server used to be colocated at<a href="http://www.exodus.com/">Exodus Communications</a>along with a bunch of equipment owned by NBCi, who allowed us to usesome of their bandwidth thanks to a business arrangement whose detailsaren't relevant.  It was a good deal for us; they handled everythingfrom swapping backup tapes to monitoring the health of the network.
<p>That is, it was a good deal until NBCi closed its doors.  Without warning,our machines disappeared from the net.  Since NBCi had been good in the pastabout staying on top of network problems without any prodding from us, wedidn't try bugging them about it until a couple days had gone by.  Imagineour surprise when we discovered that all of our contacts had been laid off,and nobody remaining had heard of us!
<p>After much fruitless flailing, we managed to contact someone who had someidea what was going on.  It turned out that all of the equipment in NBCi'scage had been sold to a liquidator.  <b>All</b> of it, including the backuptapes and our server, which wasn't NBCi property (and was marked accordingly).
<p>We attempted to find out where the equipment had ended up, but weren't ableto find anyone who knew.  We eventually decided it was a lost cause.  Wecould undoubtedly sue someone somewhere over what happened, but that won'tbring back the old site.
<p>Some of what was on the old machine is lost forever; it was backed up, butthe backups vanished along with everything else and some of our contentwasn't well-enough linked from elsewhere on the Web to show up on the<a href="http://www.archive.org/">Wayback Machine</a> or other Web archives.The Lurker's Guide was mirrored on several other sites, though, from whichwe've recovered all the content (though some of it still needs a bit ofreassembly, and other parts have fallen out of date in the intervening months).
<p>So that's what happened.  Our new setup should be less prone to anotherfiasco like that; we have physical access to the server and we're dealingdirectly with the colocation provider.  We don't have as big a pipe as weused to, but it's <em>our</em> pipe.  Needless to say, we'll be keepingour own offsite backups from now on!
<p>Thanks to everyone who wrote wondering where we went.  Enjoy...
<p>Steven Grimm<br>Larry Hastings<br>Michael Wolf
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<h5>Last update:December 25, 2001
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