Gnus development mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* Interesting gmane developments
@ 2020-01-07  0:00 dick.r.chiang
  2020-01-07  6:11 ` Sivaram Neelakantan
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: dick.r.chiang @ 2020-01-07  0:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ding

dick> Something I came across on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973589).
dick> Apologies if this is already posted on gmane.general or some such newsgroup
dick> that I don't know about.  I only subscribe to gmane.emacs.gnus.general.

Whatever Happened To news.gmane.org?
By Mr. Ingrebrigtsen

I fucked up.

Short version: If you’re reading mailing lists with an NNTP news reader via
news.gmane.org, you should update your news reader to point to news.gmane.io
instead.

Over the past few years, people have asked me what happened to Gmane, and I’ve
mostly clasped my hands over my ears and gone “la la la can’t hear you”,
because there’s nothing about the story I’m now finally going to tell that I
don’t find highly embarrassing. I had hoped I could just continue that way
until I die, but perhaps it would be more constructive to actually tell people
what’s going on instead of doing an ostrich impression.

So here’s the long, boring and stupid story.

But first, just some background, because there’s no reason you should know
what I’m blathering on about: In 2002 I started a mailing list archive called
Gmane. It was fun for many years: I got to write a whole bunch of software for
the web site, and it was a useful and satisfying hobby (with some quirks, like
not daring to visit India). After a decade or so I started getting burned out,
and that’s when my problems started.

At that point I should have looked for somebody to take over Gmane in an
orderly fashion, but there were (at least) two reasons I didn’t: I felt a
childish attachment to the entire project (I think the feeling can best
expressed summed up as “NO! MINE!”), and while I could easily see that
somebody would want to take over the web part, the NNTP part (which was the
one I used personally) seemed too obscure for anybody to be interested in.

So things limped along, me not having any fun at all at this point, and
whenever anybody approached me with feelers towards taking over, I would
mostly not reply, because when formulating a reason to say no, I didn’t really
have a good reason.

And then the DDoS happened, taking out both Gmane and my kind employer, and I
lost my shit. I can’t properly express how little I want to be typing these
paragraphs, because I’m so embarrassed by my inadequate handling of the
situation. But at least here was an opportunity to hand over Gmane to somebody
who could continue running it responsibly.

I got a whole bunch of nice offers from people, among them from somebody
working at C, a company with a good reputation and huge reach.

I thought it over, and I said yes to the offer from Y. Because I was thinking
“those C. people are nice…”  Somehow it had gotten into my mind that Y was
C. I have no explanation or excuse: I looked at two totally different company
names, and I thought in my head that I was saying yes to one while sending
email to the other.

My proposal was that I would still own the gmane.org domain, but Y said they
had to own it, so I just signed it over, sent them an SSD with the spool, and
continued running the NNTP news server (now hosted in a slightly different
place).

By that time I had realised that I’m in touch not with the company I was
intending to give Gmane to, but at that point I thought it would be churlish
to yank Gmane away from them, saying “oops! wrong company!”

Yes, everything here is embarrassing. 

It took Y half a year to get the web site up again, and finally all those dead
links stopped screaming.  However, the site went down frequently (I didn’t get
much communication from Y, but apparently there were more DDoS attacks), and
it’s been down completely for at least the last year, I think?

Which brings us to last year, when the company I’d been a co-founder of back
in 1997 and worked for since, entered into a sales process. (The other
co-founder and majority owner got cancer and suddenly died some time earlier.)
The new owner would probably not let me host the news.gmane.org server in the
server room, so I got in touch with my contact M at Y to arrange a DNS change
for the news.gmane.org server.

And I heard nothing back.

So I Cc’d everybody I’d ever known at Y, including the corporate counsel S,
and then I got a response from M, CC’d to S, that started with:

 I already responded to this on 22nd January.

So apparently M’s email can’t reach me unless he’s Cc’in S? I guess they must
have extremely high security email at Y or something, because I can’t think of
any other reason for M’s emails not reaching me. (I grepped the exim logs for
the previous year: No contact from Y’s MTAs.)

But I thought, well, now I have contact at least, so I can get the DNS updated! Then S responded:

 You have contact with M, please follow through with him directly.

 I don’t need copying on any of this.

And then… crickets: I didn’t get any further communication with Y, and no DNS
update for the NNTP server.

So at this point, I definitely should have done… something… but instead the
sale of my employer was progressing, and then it was done, and then I took a
long holiday, and then…

I’m an expert at procrastinating, especially when whatever I have to do
involves some degree of confrontation.

Time passes, until… two weeks ago, when I got a message that I really have to
have my server removed within a couple of weeks, so I sent off new emails to
the Y people, even Cc-ing the guy I wasn’t supposed to Cc, and I heard nothing
back, at all. So I have to assume the gmane.org domain can’t be updated any
more and I have to do something.

I have set up a new server, and I have mirrored all the data to it, but the
problem is the domain, of course. The name of the server is one thing: Update
your .gnus files to point to news.gmane.io now; the old name will stop working
in a couple of weeks (I got an extension, apparently).

The bigger problem is all the mailing lists: When the server goes away, 15K
mailing lists will start to bounce.

So the question is: What should I do about that? There’s several options:

1) Let them bounce: It’s not a major disaster, but I can imagine list admins
at places like vger being annoyed (Gmane subscribes to hundreds of vger
lists).

2) Unsubscribe them all and let news.gmane.org die a final death: The
unsubscription has to happen before the server goes away, because the
unsubscription emails have to come from the IP address mentioned in the SPF
record for gmane.org.

3) Unsubscribe and resubscribe under a different domain: I have registered a
new domain gmane-mx.org and done some experimentation. Of twenty lists
un/resubscribed (I’ve scripted this bit so it’s not a lot of work to do a few
hundred lists in a batch), two were successfully resubscribed. It seems the
reason for this is that sourceforge lists can no longer be subscribed without
creating a sourceforge account? And many of the other lists just bounced,
despite being active, so it means that they’ve moved without the gmane.conf
being updated, but the Gmane address is still subscribed.  Fixing this will
take manual intervention. But do I want to do this? Asking mailing lists
admins to trust me again, with a new domain after the previous debacle, is a
bit too much, isn’t it?

4) Somebody at Y could wake up and do the fucking DNS update: Make
blaine.gmane.org point to 159.69.161.202 (that’s all you have to do) and we
can at least have time to do whatever transition we’re doing in an orderly
fashion.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but list admins: If gmane.org addresses
start to bounce, and you want to fix things manually, just replace “gmane.org”
with “gmane-mx.org” in all the email addresses.  This works already.

OK, this blog post turned out to be even more meandering and unstructured than
I had anticipated, but that’s probably because I don’t even know what I want
to do here, or what people want to have happen.

* Should I just let news.gmane.org die? Is it even useful for anybody any more? 
* Should I resubscribe all the lists as gmane-mx.org to continue having a
“full” archive, and then try to make somebody more responsible and responsive take over it all again? I mean, there could be a new web interface with similar links as the old one? 
* Is the above point even relevant any more in these days of GDPR? What’s the upside for anybody running such a service? 

In many ways, I do want Gmane to go away and not have to think about it any
more, because it’s all tied up in feelings of inadequacy. I hope I’m not
fishing for sympathy here; this has been really awkward to write, and the only
conclusion anybody can draw from reading this is that I’m a fuck-up, and I
fucked this up.

But I guess I’m asking for some feedback as to what should happen next. I
think I have about a week until the old server goes away now, so whatever
happens has to happen fast.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* Re: Interesting gmane developments
  2020-01-07  0:00 Interesting gmane developments dick.r.chiang
@ 2020-01-07  6:11 ` Sivaram Neelakantan
  2020-01-07 17:03 ` 황병희
  2020-01-07 17:08 ` Eric Abrahamsen
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Sivaram Neelakantan @ 2020-01-07  6:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ding

On Mon, Jan 06 2020,dick.r.chiang@gmail.com nil wrote:

> dick> Something I came across on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973589).
> dick> Apologies if this is already posted on gmane.general or some such newsgroup
> dick> that I don't know about.  I only subscribe to gmane.emacs.gnus.general.
>
> Whatever Happened To news.gmane.org?
> By Mr. Ingrebrigtsen
>
> I fucked up.
>
> Short version: If you’re reading mailing lists with an NNTP news reader via
> news.gmane.org, you should update your news reader to point to news.gmane.io
> instead.
>

looks like we need to look out for a bit of weirdness in not able to
see some mailing lists and/or posts that don't show up for a while
after switching to the .io site?

[snipped 162 lines]

sivaram
-- 




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* Re: Interesting gmane developments
  2020-01-07  0:00 Interesting gmane developments dick.r.chiang
  2020-01-07  6:11 ` Sivaram Neelakantan
@ 2020-01-07 17:03 ` 황병희
  2020-01-07 17:08 ` Eric Abrahamsen
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: 황병희 @ 2020-01-07 17:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Gnus

Hellow dick^^^

> Whatever Happened To news.gmane.org?

Just i did re-write ~/.gnus file as follow:

#+BEGIN_SRC: emacs lisp
;;; ^Gmane_^))//
;; https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2020/01/06/whatever-happened-to-news-gmane-org/
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.gmane.io"))
#+END_SRC

And gmane.discuss is main channel for the talk, maybe^^^

Sincerely, Gmane-Gnus' fan Byung-Hee

-- 
^고맙습니다 _地平天成_ 감사합니다_^))//



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* Re: Interesting gmane developments
  2020-01-07  0:00 Interesting gmane developments dick.r.chiang
  2020-01-07  6:11 ` Sivaram Neelakantan
  2020-01-07 17:03 ` 황병희
@ 2020-01-07 17:08 ` Eric Abrahamsen
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Eric Abrahamsen @ 2020-01-07 17:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ding

dick.r.chiang@gmail.com writes:

> dick> Something I came across on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21973589).
> dick> Apologies if this is already posted on gmane.general or some such newsgroup
> dick> that I don't know about.  I only subscribe to gmane.emacs.gnus.general.
>
> Whatever Happened To news.gmane.org?
> By Mr. Ingrebrigtsen
>
> I fucked up.

Whoa! That was quite a trip. I've always quietly wondered what the heck
happened there. This sounds like a profoundly un-fun adventure.

Hope this means we'll get search functionality back for nntp at some
point!

E




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-01-07 17:08 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-01-07  0:00 Interesting gmane developments dick.r.chiang
2020-01-07  6:11 ` Sivaram Neelakantan
2020-01-07 17:03 ` 황병희
2020-01-07 17:08 ` Eric Abrahamsen

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).