Hostname pedantry II and farewell to the Red Consensus
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This posts consists of two parts, both of which are related to
Circumlunar Space but are otherwise basically entirely separate.
Hostname pedantry II
--------------------
All the way back in 2018, before the war, before COVID, before
Gemini, before ROOPHLOCH, before...okay, actually, no, not before
I built the Franken-Peugeot like I thought it might have been,
and not before I wrote VF-1 either, but nevertheless quite a very
long time ago, I made a phlog post entitled 'Hostname pedantry, or
"GNU/Circumlunar"'[1] (this was also before RMS's fall from...well,
nobody could really say "grace", but...anyway). Therein I
explained that even though the hostnames circumlunar.space and
zaibatsu.circumlunar.space both resolved to the same IP address,
and even though any Gopher content available using one name in the
URL could also be fetched at the equivalent URL using the other
name (Gopher having no protocol-level support for anything other
than this), they were nevertheless logically separate entities and
you were "supposed to" use zaibatsu.circumlunar.space for Zaibatsu
specific stuff (e.g. phlog posts by anybody with an account at the
Zaibatsu) and circumlunar.space strictly for "CS in general" stuff
(e.g. for the Circumlunar FAQ[2]). But I said that it wasn't a big
deal and, in particular, I said that "the naked domain
circumlunar.space will continue to point to the Zaibatsu, forever",
because I didn't want to break any links or scripts.
Well, I'm breaking that promise after nearly six years.
Some time in early August the Zaibatsu will be moved to a
new IP address (specifically to the one currently assigned to
gemini.circumlunar.space), but the circumlunar.space name will
continue to point to the same old address we've had ever since
March of 2018.
Now, I still really don't want to break any old links scattered
throughout the phlogosophere, so anything published by Zaibatsu
sundogs prior to the time of the great splitting will continue to
be accessible under circumlunar.space, as always. But people who
have e.g. old Moku Pona configurations which were setup in those
old distant days might stop seeing updates to phlogs which are
actually still active. And other minor weirdness might happen too,
e.g. Zaibatsu old timers may have written phlog posts early in 2018
which included footnote URLs back to previous posts of theirs using
the circumlunar.space name, even though most people reading those
posts today arrive at them under the zaibatsu.circumlunar.space name.
None of this is really catastrophic but nevertheless I want to
call on Zaibatsu sundogs who were around in 2018 and also on folks
in Gopherspace more broadly to please consider doing a tiny bit of
maintenance to help smooth over this awkward transition. If you have
a Gopherhole (no matter where it's hosted) which has ever linked
to anything at *.circumlunar.space (a quick grep ought to tell you
whether it has or not), then please consider updating those links
if necessary to bring them in line with the following guidelines:
* The raw circumlunar.space name should only be used for links to
selectors beginning with "universe/", or links which really are
talking about the Circumlunar Space project in general, i.e. about
the federation of independently administered pubnix servers and its
associated community and their projects, and not about the Zaibatsu
specifically. I suspect there are not many of these in the wild.
* Links to any personal content posted by users of the Zaibatsu
(i.e. all phlogs) should use zaibatsu.circumlunar.space. I suspect
there are probably quite some links violating this in the wild.
If you operate any kind of Gopher content aggregator, whether
it's your own personal Moku Pona setup or a public resource
like Bongusta!, please check for phlogs which are configured with
circumlunar.space URLs and change them to zaibatsu.circumlunar.space
instead. This should not trigger any "phantom updates" in change
detection systems, so don't be afraid of that.
If you have an account at the Zaibatsu and you have a .ssh/config
file or an rsync script or a git repo remote address or anything
like that which uses circumlunar.space, please change it to
zaibatsu.circumlunar.space to ensure it continues to work after
the change. Once the Zaibatsu moves to its new address, there will
be no personal accounts on circumlunar.space to log into.
The world will not end if nobody does any of this, but it will
be just a tiny bit neater if at least some people do, so please
consider it. I know it's kind of tedious. I know *I'm* being kind
of tedious. Thank you for your patience.
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/hostname-pedantry-gnu-circumlunar.txt
[2]
gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/universe/faq.txt
Farewell to the Red Consensus
-----------------------------
Zaibatsu sundog tfurrows ran a quirky and novel anonymous Gopherspace
service under the named Red Consensus (consensus.circumlunar.space),
which functioned by means of a custom shell program (written
in Commodore BASIC!) which was launched when you SSHed in with a
username that required no password. This was one of the very first
"Circumlunar Outposts", personal projects run by sundogs which offer
additional services (but fall short of offering shell access) to the
circumlunar community or the public. It was launched, I believe,
in October of 2018.
The Red Consensus lived on a Raspberry Pi in tfurrows' home behind
his ordinary internet connection, and sadly he has informed me that,
without warning, his ISP is now blocking incoming connections on
the relevant port which means the Consensus is no longer accessible
from the outside world and therefore, for all intents and purposes,
has ceased to exist. This is a real shame, but probably does not
come as a huge surprise to many. The slow but steady decline of
the ability to host your own internet services at home has been
widely lamented in the relevant circles for a great many years,
and I don't think anybody expects the situation to get better any
time soon, or frankly, ever. That whole concept is now a historical
footnote from the freewheeling early days of the internet, before
it was captured, appliancised, gentrified, whatever.
Anyway, this point of this section of this post is not to mope over
the state of the internet, it's to say thank you to tfurrows for
taking the effort to make Gopherspace a little more interesting.
And, while I'm at it, thank you also to yargo who continues to run
Ryumin's Dome (dome.circumlunar.space), our git provider and now
certainly the oldest Circumlunar Outpost (perhaps it always was,
I forget which came first), and to visiblink who runs our XMPP
server and previously also ran our webserver in the days before
any of the colonies offered webspace.
