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Black | |
March 10th, 2018 | |
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If you're reading this that means that my sdf gopher hole is dead. | |
That's dramatic! | |
Recently there was a second round of shake-ups in the SDF gopher | |
space. Unlike sdf.org, which has been running gophernicus for | |
quite a while, gopher.club suddenly forked away and started | |
running a different server. This was a surprise for most of us | |
since gopher.club was just an alias for SDF, or so we thought. The | |
change blew up a few of the prettier gopher holes like jynx and | |
cat's. Mine was relatively unscathed, but it raised an issue in my | |
mind. SDF is not a safe space for things to live. | |
SDF is a test-bed for lots of things. It does some fantastic work | |
in aiding the stability of NetBSD. I know better than to host | |
a critical web site there, but for some reason I thought of it as | |
a place where gopher holes could persist relatively unscathed over | |
time. It's been running for so long already, what could change | |
that, right? | |
Then in the matter of months we witness some pretty big shifts in | |
the system. The worst part of it is the lack of communication. | |
There was no warning of changes coming, no announcement of why or | |
to what end, nothing. The SDF users are pretty relaxed about it, | |
but it still put that nagging thought in the back of my mind. Is | |
this really safe? | |
So on a whim I bought a handful of gopher domains while at a diner | |
for lunch. One of these is gopher.black, my new home. It's running | |
on a raspberry pi in my spare room, clinging to my wifi and | |
dangling on the edge of the desk without so much as a plastic | |
case. Is this safe? Well, no. I'll get a case for it tomorrow and | |
hard-wire it to the network. I've set up dynamic dns through | |
namesilo.com using their API and a little python. I've still got | |
to configure the pi to restart the gopher server upon reboot. | |
There's plenty of work to be done. | |
Is it reliable, is it safe? Well, no and yet yes. I'm running | |
things myself and in the end that's where reliability is. Do it | |
yourself, own it, and you can trust it. Anything else is false | |
hope. | |
Black thoughts for gopher.black? I think it's hopeful. | |
I wish the SDF gopher community the best. I'll still be active all | |
over SDF, in IRC, com, even anonradio. I love it there, but I've | |
learned my lesson not to trust it with my stuff. |