Hobbes Retirement

[Roderick Klein]

Hi Roderick,

I already send an email this morning to you as well Ian :-)
I send it to your gmail address.
Roderick

ok, checked my gmail account, mostly full of rubbish as I rarely look at it, you are better off emailing me at ian@ the os2site.com website

I send you an email Ian.

Roderick

[Ian B Manners]

replied 

[Martin Iturbide]

Hello

There was an update on the Hobbes Retirement Announcement.
A link was included where people can download a 18GB file with all the hobbes files.
https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/archives/

This folder contains archives of the contents of hobbes.

- hobbes_ftp_11Jan2024.tar
  - This file contains all of the FTP content minus this 'archives' folder.


Archives of the website/database code is being evaluated and may be included here in the future.

Regards

[Tom]

It seems another group is also working on a way to save the content of Hobbes: the Classic Computing cctalk Mailing List.
Web interface: https://classiccmp.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/cctalk@classiccmp.org/thread/YIGLWOEQHX2UUWASNE2QFRUOATRCTBUX/

I already informed Roderick about this.

[Martin Iturbide]

It seems another group is also working on a way to save the content of Hobbes: the Classic Computing cctalk Mailing List.
Web interface: https://classiccmp.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/cctalk@classiccmp.org/thread/YIGLWOEQHX2UUWASNE2QFRUOATRCTBUX/

I already informed Roderick about this.

Thanks Tom for the info. Jason Scott is a famous archivist, it is good that he is going to backup hobbes too, but he only preserve files. We currently need to have an active site were developers/users can still upload OS/2 software.

My hopes are with Ian and Roderick with OS2Site now.

Regards

[Doug Clark]

Martin, IAN, Roderick, etc.

Do you think NMSU be willing to permanently redirect the URL hobbes.nmsu.edu to a URL of our choosing?  Or could we buy the URL? 

The hobbes website is pretty simple and straightforward.  I am guessing the archive directory structure matches the directory structure laid out on the web site.   Seems like it would be relatively simple to recreate hobbes website and point the old (current) url to the new server.

[Roderick Klein]

Martin, IAN, Roderick, etc.

Do you think NMSU be willing to permanently redirect the URL hobbes.nmsu.edu to a URL of our choosing?  Or could we buy the URL? 

The hobbes website is pretty simple and straightforward.  I am guessing the archive directory structure matches the directory structure laid out on the web site.   Seems like it would be relatively simple to recreate hobbes website and point the old (current) url to the new server.

I opened a ticket for this 2 days ago at NMSU. I just called them and a manager is looking into the request.

You see I see more people with ideas to mirror but I see an overall lacking plan
1) We want the impact of the domainname go away to be as small as possible. The fact that hobbes.nmsu.edu shuts down is not a good moral boost.
Since a lot of OS/2 users live in caves (as in habbits do not change) its good to have a pointer from hobbes.nmsu.edu that points the official copy of the (os2site.com).

2) Which repo should be leading ? I assume we want to have 1 official repo that people upload files to.  And from there on it can be synched to other hobbes mirrors.

3) Anybody made a list of current servers that run a mirror of hobbes ? Send me the list if you want to help out and then we can see if they can be pointed to the new official mirror
so the old mirrors updated. You see I am now aware of 5 people mirroring the old hobbes. But what about the points above ?

Roderick Klein
Prsident OS/2 VOICE

[Roderick Klein]

As a first thing.
www.os2site.com will get readonly FTP download and a write only FTP incoming in the next couple of hours.
Stay tuned as we work on stuff in the engine room.

Please do not upload complete directory trees and dozens of files. Next step is to get somehow os2site.com synched with the current content of hobbes.

Roderick Klein
President OS/3 VOICE

[Doug Clark]

Roderick,

So is your plan to have two sites? Merge what is now os2site with what is now hobbes? Something else maybe?

I ask because it seems like os2site has stuff that is not on hobbes.  I kinda like the idea of the 2 sites being different.  But that is easy for me to say since I am not maintaining either site.

[Valery Sedletski]

Hi all. As an option, I could host the Hobbes archive too. I already have the mirror of it, which is synced with hobbes.nmsu.edu each week.
The mirror is in [ftp|http|https]://[ftp|hobbes].osfree.org/upload/mirrors/hobbes.nmsu.edu/.
It also has shortcuts for quick access as:

http://osfree.org/download/
http://hobbes.osfree.org/
ftp://osfree.org/download/

The missing part is still the web part for search etc.
Waiting for it when Hobbes admins publish it.

[Roderick Klein]

Roderick,

So is your plan to have two sites? Merge what is now os2site with what is now hobbes? Something else maybe?

I ask because it seems like os2site has stuff that is not on hobbes.  I kinda like the idea of the 2 sites being different.  But that is easy for me to say since I am not maintaining either site.

os2site.com is a copy of hobbes its just outdated since Ian could not synched the data properly to os2site.ciom.

Roderick

[Roderick Klein]

Hi all. As an option, I could host the Hobbes archive too. I already have the mirror of it, which is synced with hobbes.nmsu.edu each week.
The mirror is in [ftp|http|https]://[ftp|hobbes].osfree.org/upload/mirrors/hobbes.nmsu.edu/.
It also has shortcuts for quick access as:

http://osfree.org/download/
http://hobbes.osfree.org/
ftp://osfree.org/download/

The missing part is still the web part for search etc.
Waiting for it when Hobbes admins publish it.

The problem is not the mirror of the site itself from my perspective. There are plenty of mirrors floating around and everybody is running around wanting to create more mirrors.
What is being forgotten is what should be the replacement for hobbes.nmsu.edu which we would consider the main archive. Where are new files going to be uploaded ?
Or should we have 5 mirrors where you can all upload files. So if a developer uploads something to mirror, how do the other mirrors get updated ?

That is why I suggested os2site.com. As I typed I already have a ticket out to NMSU and an email to somebody working at NMSU asking if hobbes.nmsu.edu can somehow be redirected to os2site.com. That way we have one central from which we can mirror and people can keep finding the old content via hobbes.nmsu.edu.

Roderick

Roderick

[Valery Sedletski]

Yes, we need a central point to upload files. Other mirrors could be synced with it automatically. I have a cron task which run once a week, which starts
wget syncing files with hobbes. The problem with os2site.com is that Ian does not allow anybody mirroring it. Don't know a reason, maybe, he has a limited ISP
tariff at home, so it's a problem for him. I have a server at a datacenter with an unlimited connection. So, it's not a problem for me. So, other mirrors could be
synced automatically without a problem.

[Ian B Manners]

Hi Valery,

I stopped the mirroring, (unless someone asked me for FTP access with username access) as an entity was mirroring the website constantly, as in machine gun constant with a large number of IP's from different ranges - yes, it killed my link all the time. I would ban the IP's and they would pop up with a new collection of IP's from several ranges. This coupled with all the new search engines back then ignoring robots.txt etc, I decided I had better things to do with my time so I added limiting and blacklisting rules.

That being said, Roderick/Voice have hosted os2site.com for the last couple of years now so it is no longer on an Australian HFC link

[Valery Sedletski]

Ah, so it's now hosted in another place, with no limits. Then of course, no problems with limited traffic. That's good.