penderel

[Paul Mison]

Summary: penderel is dead, but I have its data. Please get in touch 
if this affects you.

Some history: penderel was set up in state51 in June 2002. It never 
booted cleanly; it relied on a boot floppy to bring it up from the 
SCSI hard drive that hosted the OS. /home was on an IDE drive. That 
died some time in 2003, I think, but was replaced with relatively 
little trauma.

A week ago on Monday, a reboot failed with SCSI errors from the 
system drive. The system was rescued with a boot CD, and while the 
SCSI drive could be mounted (so the system was moved to a new 
parted-created partition on the IDE drive) it wasn't happy to boot 
the system.

Two days of remote hacking at LILO to get it to boot from the IDE 
drive failed, and in the absence of any sign of anyone wanting to 
bother visiting the site to fix booting, and the likely cost of 
trying to maintain the aging hardware, the decision was taken to move 
the mailing list, website and IRC bot to a new virtual host, windmill 
(see previous emails to list).

Yesterday I went to state51 and picked up the two IDE drives (the 
live and dead one), so if you had a shell account (and hence data) on 
penderel and want it back, please get in contact off list and I'll 
try and make it available to you. This may take a while.

However, my understanding is that windmill does not have the space 
for shell accounts. A compromise that has been mooted is that, if 
you're willing to administer the server (and my inclination is to 
expand that to maintaining the mailing list, and website, including 
both content and code) then shell accounts may be available. However, 
there's no official word on this yet.

At some point someone will fix all the email aliases to point to a 
different email address. Again, get in touch with me and I'll pass 
them on to the relevant people (or even do it myself, there's a 
thought).

The remaining hardware of penderel (a chassis, SCSI drive, CD and so 
on) are all at state51. Unless someone cares to fetch it, it's likely 
they'll dispose of it in short order.

Thanks again to state51 for the hosting, and to all the people who've 
been through a stint on sysops at london.pm.org

Personally, I feel that penderel has been a failure. It took enough 
maintenance to be annoying to various people, and never offered 
enough over (what's currently available from) pm.org hosting to 
justify it. Perhaps it was a victim of timing; when it was first 
mooted DSL and colocation were expensive, but by the time it was 
deployed hosting was cheap. In any case, I'm not sad to see it go.

-- 
:: paul
:: blue coconut slush