After much delay and many a snag, I am pleased to report that the
NFB of California is on the InterNET in live IP. As soon as the folks at
the Internic registration site update our records, you will be able to
type:
%telnet lothlorien.nfbcal.org
from your favorite InterNET connected host and login. If you do not
already have an account on the nfbcal machine, then you will soon be able
to register for one via the network. If you had an account on moria, then
you have one on lothlorien.
You will notice that I have not mentioned moria as the host to telnet to
from the InterNET. Although as I write this, moria is alive and well on
the network with lothlorien, it will soon be going away. This is because
the hardware on which moria is situated is extremely aged and is becoming
unsupportable. It was decided to keep the name moria with that hardware,
however, because the transition from off-net systems to on-net systems
would be much easierand painless if Moria could continue working for some
time after lothlorien came on board.
For the technically interested, lothlorien is a 486DX/2 PC/AT with 16MB
of physical memory and 2.5GB of disk space running NetBSD, one of the free
Unix-like operating systems. In fact, for the moment, lothlorien is the
NFB machine with an additional 2GB SCSI disk tossed in to store the nfbcal
data and to give the nfb-rd archive more space. Soon, this disk will move
to another computer, which will become lothlorien, and lothlorien will move
into the role of serving solely as a development machine for XWindows
speech. The work I'm doing on the project at the moment doesn't require a
dedicated machine and since moria was failing fast, I felt the NFB machine
could serve as a stop-gap.
You will still be able to send mail to moria, but you should try to clean
out your old aliases so that when mail to moria does break, you won't be
too affected. Also, when moria goes away permanently, you will get
lothlorien when you telnet to moria.
Now that the NFB of California is on the net, I plan to put up an ftp
server for the nfb-rd archives, as well as other things that people would
be interested in. Please submit ideas to this list, and, if you have
InterNET access, state whether or not you would be interested in
administering a corner of the server so that I don't have to implement
every idea.
I'm real excited about the move from mail-only access to IP access for the
NFB of California, but I realize that I don't have time to make the server
as as useful as it could be. I'm willing to maintain the machine and keep
it running for the use of the network community, but I need help installing
services, writing documentation, and introducing it to the blind people who
could take advantage of the services that it has to offer.
With all of these thoughts written down, let's put our minds together and
make the nfbcal server a model that other states can use to form their own
net presence.
-Brian
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:03 PST