[pchelpers] Re: Rhythms calls it quits: FreeLists forced to switch networks

John,

Thanks for the warning. I am finally proud to say that the little "green &
blue" people have finally left my home. Just kidding, thanks again. Have a
nice day. :)

John F

-----Original Message-----
From: pchelpers-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:pchelpers-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of John Durham
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 3:56 PM
To: PC-HELPERS Business & Service Contacts
Subject: [pchelpers] Rhythms calls it quits: FreeLists forced to switch
networks



I'm forwarding this to the list for your information. Comments?

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I guess all the news can't be good.  Please read this annoucement
carefully.  There will be a quiz.

A little bit of background information for those who might not be in the
know:  FreeLists' internet link is a high-speed SDSL link currently
provided by Rhythms and DSL Indiana, a Rhythms reseller.

Why DSL, you ask?  Well, consider the expense of running a service like
FreeLists.  Then consider that a decent T1 will cost roughly $1000-$1300
per month.  A T1 is unaffordable for a service without any income.  Our
1.54mbps SDSL circuit provides the same bandwidth at a fraction of the
cost, and that allows us to keep the services we provide free of
charge.
And as for reliability, we've had 100% uptime since the line was
installed
back in May.

Ok, time for the bad news: On August 10th, Rhythms
(http://www.rhythms.net) announced that it will be filing Chapter 11 and
terminating its lines nation-wide.  They sent out 31-day notices
essentially letting everyone know that they'll have to be moving their
lines.  Their press releases and further information related to the
issue
can be read here: http://www.rhythms.net/ch11.cfm  This means there's
going to be some downtime.  I'm not entirely sure how much, but I've
been
promised less than 24 hours.

The good news: DSL Indiana, foreseeing this outcome due to [mostly] the
downturn in the tech market, purchased their own DS-3 (that's 45mbps, or
approximately 30 T1's) line and put all the motions in place to simply
do
all of their DSL themselves.  So what's that mean?  They'll be migrating
FreeLists' circuit to their own network and doing all of the networking
in-house.  What else?  We won't have to deal with companies that fail at
the whim of the stock holder.  (For those of you who haven't been with
us
since our last network switch this May, our previous provider suffered
the
same fate as Rhythms.)

The other good news: DSL Indiana & FreeLists own our IP address range,
so
we won't have to worry about updating the domain names and such.  Thus,
downtime will be limited to the time it takes them to install the new
router and move our circuit over to their hardware.  In theory, that'll
only take a few minutes; in practice, probably a few hours.

The still-other good news: We've been testing and burning in a new
server
over the past few weeks!  This one features a bit faster CPU, twice the
RAM, and hardware-based hot-swappable RAID-5.  So I'll be taking the
"opportunity" of the unavoidable downtime to migrate everything to the
new
server.  And guess what?  That means even better reliability for the
services.

So exactly when is all this happening?  Well honestly, I'm not
completely
sure.  Supposedly, DSL Indiana was going to be migrating half of their
customers last weekend and the other half this upcoming weekend, but I
haven't heard if that plan has taken effect.  Rhythms' lines will be
going
down sometime on the 10th, but again, I've been promised that we won't
be
out for more than 24 hours.

And why'd I wait so long to tell everyone, when I heard about this on
August 10th?  Well, I was abducted by aliens, and they did these
horrible
experiments on me, rendering me unconscious for three weeks... Ok, ok --
I
delayed the annoucement to ensure that I knew exactly what was going to
happen, and as you can tell, I'm still not sure what's going to happen
--
in fact, I only sent this newsletter because the outage is now only 6
days
away, and you folks deserve to know what's going on.

What should you do?  What can you do?  What do you need to do?  Nothing
at
all: we'll handle it from here.  What do I need to do?  Drink less
caffeine.  And what about those Aliens?  Well, they don't have enough
FreeLists mailing lists. =)

I won't make any other annoucements about this unless something dire or
unexpected comes up, so if you'd like more specific information as I get
it, let me know and I'll keep you informed with the up-to-the-minute
stuff.

John


- FreeLists Staff

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