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Black
March 10th, 2018
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If you're reading this that means that my sdf gopher hole is dead.

That's dramatic!

Recently there was a second round of shake-ups in the SDF gopher
space. Unlike sdf.org, which has been running gophernicus for
quite a while, gopher.club suddenly forked away and started
running a different server. This was a surprise for most of us
since gopher.club was just an alias for SDF, or so we thought. The
change blew up a few of the prettier gopher holes like jynx and
cat's. Mine was relatively unscathed, but it raised an issue in my
mind. SDF is not a safe space for things to live.

SDF is a test-bed for lots of things. It does some fantastic work
in aiding the stability of NetBSD. I know better than to host
a critical web site there, but for some reason I thought of it as
a place where gopher holes could persist relatively unscathed over
time. It's been running for so long already, what could change
that, right?

Then in the matter of months we witness some pretty big shifts in
the system. The worst part of it is the lack of communication.
There was no warning of changes coming, no announcement of why or
to what end, nothing. The SDF users are pretty relaxed about it,
but it still put that nagging thought in the back of my mind. Is
this really safe?

So on a whim I bought a handful of gopher domains while at a diner
for lunch. One of these is gopher.black, my new home. It's running
on a raspberry pi in my spare room, clinging to my wifi and
dangling on the edge of the desk without so much as a plastic
case. Is this safe? Well, no. I'll get a case for it tomorrow and
hard-wire it to the network. I've set up dynamic dns through
namesilo.com using their API and a little python. I've still got
to configure the pi to restart the gopher server upon reboot.
There's plenty of work to be done.

Is it reliable, is it safe? Well, no and yet yes. I'm running
things myself and in the end that's where reliability is. Do it
yourself, own it, and you can trust it. Anything else is false
hope.

Black thoughts for gopher.black? I think it's hopeful.

I wish the SDF gopher community the best. I'll still be active all
over SDF, in IRC, com, even anonradio. I love it there, but I've
learned my lesson not to trust it with my stuff.