Well, there appear to be other than technical problems in bringing the eSIF
back.
Our downstream ISP is now limiting the outbound traffic of our server farm to
approx. 10 KBytes/sec. Seems like we weren't the *only* ones to notice the
several-orders-of-magnitude increase in traffic that was choking off our pipe.
This is not good, and I don't mean from the point of view of the eSIF or those
of you who want it back in all its glory for free -- my (not to mention my
partners') act of generosity in hosting the eSIF will now probably cost us more
$$$ if we want a reasonable upload capacity back for the entire server farm
(and we *do* want that capacity back, for other reasons altogether). Needless
to say, my partners are less than totally happy with me, and there's going to
be some financial ramifications.
No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.
Well, here are some options, in rough order of decreasing preference from my
point of view:
1. We encourage the whiners on the List and elsewhere (you *know* who you are)
to suck it up and buy the damn CD -- after all, it's only $23.00 U.S. including
shipping, and you obviously can't live without it, even though you seem to
think that others should perform thousands of hours of work just so you can
avoid the $23.00 U.S. expenditure. To which I say "TANSTAAFL," and leave it at
that. ("But information just wants to be free!" Yeah, right. So why the Hell
does it cost so much to generate it in the first place?)
2. We encourage Olympus America or Olympus Japan (or whoever in the Olympus
group) to host the eSIF, either in whole or in part. Perhaps the deal we could
make is that *all* administration would be taken on by one or more members of
the List (with Hans having veto rights over any decision, since it's his baby),
and we police the site so that there are no further "pigs at the trough"
issues. This would probably be a delicate negotiation, and from Oly's point of
view, I can't really see why they'd do it. But who knows? We'd definitely
need a "point-man" (or "point-woman") for this negotiation, and I'm thinking
one or more of the Japanese Listmembers would be good choices...
3. We leave the central URL (www.e-sif.net) alone, and split the bulk of the
actual content across AT LEAST half-a-dozen different sites, to try and avoid
the bandwidth-sucking problem. The central URL would do the appropriate link
redirection.
3a. Further to above, the PDFs get removed, and we institute a "request" system
whereby people register to get PDFs of interest sent to them in private e-mail.
That way we could limit the amount of PDFs that get sent out (say, two per
person per month).
4. We try to re-establish the eSIF at a central site (I have a couple of
possibilities) with throttling enabled.
5. We try various combinations of the above.
Ideas? Thoughts? Bouquets? All brickbats will be appropriately dealt with
(i.e., sent to /dev/null 8^> ).
Garth
< This message was delivered via the Olympus Mailing List >
< For questions, mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
< Web Page: http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright/olympuslist.html >
|