Proffers 2025-01-26
The end is nigh.
No later than five days from now I am going to log into the last Disinfodrome server, type this command, and press enter. As a prequel I’m turning off all the Open Semantic Search systems some time today.
shutdown -h now
One large drive is coming to me, the other is going in a box with an address in Europe. The rest of it isn’t worth shipping, so it goes on a pallet, and then the scapper that comes at irregular intervals hauls it off for recovery.
It was a good run, thanks to everyone who spotted interesting data sets, who queried the ones that were active, and who occasionally managed to loft a find into the news.
All good things must come to an end, we’ve been losing equipment to age related issues since the start of the year, and have come to the point where I can not assure that Disinfodrome will be continuously available.
The elderly Dell R610 was shut down a couple months ago and its drives are sitting here on my desk, awaiting some new duty. The Dell R430 we bought to replace it was faulty, still a good deal just for the ram in it, but we did not get the third machine we needed for a high availability cluster. The #2 R420 is in some Byzantine failure mode where it mostly runs, but can not write a new partition table. Reality is stranger than fiction - this curiously selective behavior does seem to be hardware, rather than software. It is serving as a cold backup of the lone survivor.
So we’re down to just one workhorse - the E5-2450v2 system that now has 192GB of ram after we raided #2. It’s been rock solid for over four years and in general these things run forever if you don’t mess with them, but the entity that has been paying for hosting is ceasing operation at the end of this year. Someone sent me $200 in early December - enough to run it into January, and pay for the drives to be shipped to me. That hardware is thirteen years old and I’m not even keeping the 32GB DDR3 memory from it, since the only other system I have that could use it is the HP Z420 under my desk, which is going to the recycler when I move later this month.
We haven’t lost any data. We WON’T lose any data. But if there’s something you want to preserve, now would be the time to ask.