Hi All,
Gumbynet has really changed a lot over the last three years. We started out
in July of '98 with rendrag.dynip.com (Vic), and gumbynet.dynip.com (NT) and
later linked in gumbynet-perth.dyndns.org (Perth, duh). It wasn't long
after that, that we registered gumbynet.org, and had the Vic and NT servers
online pretty much permanently. Kieran discovered irc.labyrinth.net.au
sitting alone by itself after a disagreement between them and
irc.aphalink.com.au, managed to talk Labyrinth into letting us take on
management of the server, and link it to gumbynet.
We soon got Andy Church's services up and running, and started on a
long-running campaign to customize the services and IRCD to do what we
wanted them to do. I then got a Telstra link, so rendrag.gumbynet.org was
online 24/7 and we finally had two permanent servers. We soon got
xenon.gumbynet.org linked in (funny story about that later..) and things
were cruising along! I shifted to canberra to work for ISA, and
isa.act.au.gumbynet.org was born, followed not long after by a visit to
canberra by kieran, who dropped off localhost.gumbynet.org. Not too long
ago, inspire rocked along, and linked iah.vic and alpha.vic into the
network, bringing us up to 8 servers.
We've had some darned good times - group parties, get-togethers, and general
mucking about. In the months leading up to christmas though, things
changed. There was a general disagreement between members as to what sort of
pranks were and weren't funny, whether they should be attributed to
gumbynet, etc.. Plus a few of the members were going through some fairly
strange things in their personal lives, and there was generally a lot of
fighting.
I officially separated from the group in early december due to the legal
hassles various members' activities on other IRC networks were causing me.
Kieran also separated from the group somewhere around the same time, during
his move to Melbourne, and I know that quite a few of the others also left
around the same time. I've jumped back on IRC a few times over the last six
months, when Replica has come and got me to relink the servers after a
netsplit.
Kieran and I have been discussing the future of our involvement with
GumbyNet over the last few days, and we feel that it's time for us to move
on and explore other things. Those of you who still use GN IRC will notice
that the services are now running on labyrinth, and no longer on localhost.
(Inspire, if you could add a H: line on iah for labyrinth, so that iah
accepts it as having services?) On Friday evening, 15th of June 2001,
Kieran and I will be delinking the IRCD's on rendrag.vic, hamster.nsw,
localhost.act, and isa.act.. xenon.qld disappeared a few months ago when
xenon went bankrupt (I suppose there really is no money in running 72
dialups on 64k ISDN and 128K satellite?), and alpha.vic also seems to be
gone. I'm not sure what Inspire will do with iah.vic, but that's up to
him...
the dns for these servers will point users at irc.labyrinth.net.au
I'll be putting this email up on www.gumbynet.org later today to explain
what's going on, so users (there's still laby people around, right?) don't
get too confused..
We're not sure what we're going to do with box3n and localhost as yet - most
likely these will be put to other tasks (e.g. box3n is being transformed
into pinegap.net, the underground radio/data comms bbs I've been building up
over the last month or so). Redirection of @gumbynet.org email addresses
will continue on for the forseable future, however it is likely that we will
discontinue shell access and webhosting on these two boxes in the near
future (We'll contact those of you with domains hosted on localhost to
organise alternate hosting sometime soon..)
I'd like to thank everybody who has been involved in GumbyNet over the last
three years - We went a long way to fulfilling our goals, with 8 servers at
the end, or own customized ircd (thanks tim :) and services (thanks tim and
kieran), and a fairly solid 60-70 users, peaking at 100+ overnight. We've
had our good and bad times, but I think the good times certainly outweigh
the bad overall, and I know I've enjoyed working with you all.
Cheers,
Damien