I've copied a notice received from Freelists below. 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 UNSUBSCRIBE by sending email to triadtechtalk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with unsubscribe in the Subject field. To VIEW/CHANGE your subscription status go to //www.freelists.org/webpage/triadtechtalk