From: Ryan Lackey <rdl@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 23:50:27 +0800
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: Archives? What archives?
Message-ID: <tw77lzf3oun.fsf@denmark-vesey.MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Tim May <tcmay@got.net> writes:

> 
> At 1:44 AM -0700 9/4/98, Sparkes, Ian, ZFRD AC wrote:
> 
> >---- Facetious comment begin -----
> >At least now we know why people aren't following Tim's
> >advice to 'check the archives' before putting their feet in
> >their mouths.
> >---- Facetious comment end -----
> 
> Try http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/
> 
> If the archives at some sites are going down, this could be for various
> reasons.
> 
> Being an assembly of mostly-anarchist-leaning folks, with no leadership, no
> organization, no hierarchy, and no procedures, there are no officially
> maintained archives.
> 
> What we have are what people choose to put up.
> 
> Someone was talking in the last half year about burning a CD-ROM with a big
> chunk of the archives on it. I haven't heard if this ever happened and if
> it was made available for sale. (It seems that about every year someone
> launches a project to generate such a CD-ROM, but I haven't seen the
> followthrough.)
> 
> --Tim May

I had an archive on sof.mit.edu, but shortly after I left Boston, MA, US
where the machine is located, the HDD on the machine (or the controller)
died, and I'm still trying to get one of my former housemates to repair it.

I'm currently in the wrong country to fix the drive, and don't expect to
be back.

I prepared the CD-ROMs for sale (I had a CD-R on the machine), and posted
several times offering to sell them, but no one ever actually sent me
the money.  Actually, a small number of people did, and I sold them, but
I don't remember who they were.

I also don't have particularly good backups of that machine.  I think
someone mirrored it at toad.com before it died, so they're probably not
lost forever.  I don't have a machine with free bandwidth from which
to host it, though, until sof.mit.edu is back on the net.  I may be
sending the HDD out to a drive recovery company anyway for the other
data on the drive.

This was an amateurish hobby server of mine, and not a production-grade
service, so people shouldn't complain too much that I didn't invest the
money in quality replication.
-- 
Ryan Lackey
rdl@mit.edu
http://sof.mit.edu/rdl/