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114 lines
4.0 KiB
114 lines
4.0 KiB
<html>
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<head>
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<title>The Very Long Night of Midwinter.com</title>
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<h1>What the heck happened to Midwinter?</h1>
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<p>
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How can a site vanish for such a long time? Read on for a brief summary
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of what happened.
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<p>
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The Midwinter Web server used to be colocated at
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<a href="http://www.exodus.com/">Exodus Communications</a>
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along with a bunch of equipment owned by NBCi, who allowed us to use
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some of their bandwidth thanks to a business arrangement whose details
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aren't relevant. It was a good deal for us; they handled everything
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from swapping backup tapes to monitoring the health of the network.
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<p>
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That is, it was a good deal until NBCi closed its doors. Without warning,
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our machines disappeared from the net. Since NBCi had been good in the past
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about staying on top of network problems without any prodding from us, we
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didn't try bugging them about it until a couple days had gone by. Imagine
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our surprise when we discovered that all of our contacts had been laid off,
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and nobody remaining had heard of us!
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<p>
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After much fruitless flailing, we managed to contact someone who had some
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idea what was going on. It turned out that all of the equipment in NBCi's
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cage had been sold to a liquidator. <b>All</b> of it, including the backup
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tapes and our server, which wasn't NBCi property (and was marked accordingly).
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<p>
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We attempted to find out where the equipment had ended up, but weren't able
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to find anyone who knew. We eventually decided it was a lost cause. We
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could undoubtedly sue someone somewhere over what happened, but that won't
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bring back the old site.
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<p>
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Some of what was on the old machine is lost forever; it was backed up, but
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the backups vanished along with everything else and some of our content
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wasn't well-enough linked from elsewhere on the Web to show up on the
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<a href="http://www.archive.org/">Wayback Machine</a> or other Web archives.
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The Lurker's Guide was mirrored on several other sites, though, from which
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we've recovered all the content (though some of it still needs a bit of
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reassembly, and other parts have fallen out of date in the intervening months).
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<p>
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So that's what happened. Our new setup should be less prone to another
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fiasco like that; we have physical access to the server and we're dealing
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directly with the colocation provider. We don't have as big a pipe as we
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used to, but it's <em>our</em> pipe. Needless to say, we'll be keeping
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our own offsite backups from now on!
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<p>
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Thanks to everyone who wrote wondering where we went. Enjoy...
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<p>
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Steven Grimm<br>
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Larry Hastings<br>
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Michael Wolf
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<pre>
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</pre>
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<p nowrap>
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</nobr>
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<h5>
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Last update:
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December 25, 2001
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</h5>
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</body>
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</html>
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