Amigazone versus Merlancia

[hrlaser]

Hi
This is Harv, founder of AmigaZone.

Let's put a stop to this rumor nonsense now.
No one shut down or killed off AmigaZone. It's been running continuously for 21 years.

The hardware it's running on was infested with a worm abouta week ago causing 100% CPU usage. Today, the system became more corrupted. We have taken it down and techs are working to fix it.

ANYTHING YOU READ TO THE CONTRARY FROM ANY OTHER SOURCE IS B.S.

We hope to have it back up and running within a week.

This depends on the degree of corruption to the OS and how much work it takes to repair it. If we can't repair it, we'll move it to new hardware and a newer OS. Simple as that.

ANYTHING YOU READ ANYWHERE TO THE CONTRARY ON THIS OR ANY OTHER SITE OTHER THAN MY OWN, OR HEAR OR READ FROM ANY OTHER SOURCE IS BALONEY. Do not believe it.

I don't want to hear any more about conspiracies or so-and-so shut it down or any other such nonsense. Get a life, people. AmigaZone will be back up when we have completed repairs. So stop the damn rumors.

Harv
AmigaZone Founder

[hrlaser]

cecilia wrote:
Ryan killed amigazone.
which is a tragedy because of all the files that used to be there. a historic site killed by stupidity and selfishness. :destroy:

This is pure and utter horsesh*t. The system AmigaZone runs on was corrupted by a worm. We are working to repair it. Stop dreaming up conspiracies. When we have it fixed, it'll be back up. It may take days or a week or more. That's the truth. I founded AmigaZone, and I run it and if you don't believe me, then you can kiss my shiny metal ass.

Harv

[hrlaser]

Piru wrote:

AmigaZone has NOT been killed off or shut down. Absolutely not. The system it runs on picked up a worm and was corrupted. We are working to repair the OS and have it back up within a week. Repeat: no one "shut it down" on purpose. It is an OS corruption and we are working to fix it.

Oh dear, the joys of running old Apache.

Anyone running Apache 1.3.26 today is just asking for trouble.

AmigaZone does not run on an Apache system. The publicity site, http://www.amigazone.com is on an Apache system at an ISP.

The AmigaZone service itself is on totally different hardware. Totally different OS. What it runs on, and any other proprietary details are no one's business.

The OS was hit by a worm a week ago and we've been trying to make it clean again. The actual AmigaZone service is currently down until we get it repaired. The publicity site, running on a totally different system is still up.

Yes the news section is stale. I have other things to do in life than maintain a free, public Amiga news source. Dig? The AmigaZone system itself gets a daily news feed but that system is currently down. Its publicity Web site is up. I don't know how much clearer I can make it.

There are no conspiracies, no "someone killed it off" no "someone bamboozled someone else." So just spend your time on things that actually matter in this world and stop dreaming up conspiracies and generating rumors. It serves no purpose, creates ill-will and is just bad Karma.

Harv
AmigaZone Founder

[hrlaser]

cecilia wrote:
(a bunch of nonsense followed by).. a historic site (followed by more nonsense)..

The files are safely backed up in at least half a dozen different places. No one killed anything. See my postings above.

This site, Amiga.org has gone down for periods. Aminet has gone down. eBay crashes. Name a site that doesn't have problems from time to time. This is modern technology and technology isn't perfect.

AmigaZone is under repair. The files are all safely stored. The Amiga "community" has unfortunately degenerated into a tiny group of people have nothing better to do with their lives than spead rumors and try to destroy reputations. This is sad, sadistic, unproductive, and unnecessary. Do you enjoy torturing small animals too?

AmigaZone will be back up when we get the OS problem fixed. Simple as that. It's my baby and I put my heart and soul into it for 21 years even though the Amiga community has degenerated into the sad, sick situation it's in now.

We're doing everything we can to get the service repaired and back online. It will not go "off the air" permanently until I decide it's time. This is not that time.

Comprendo?

Harv
AmigaZone Founder

[hrlaser]

Having a bad day? Yeah, you could say that. I run a service that's had 99.9999% uptime for ten years staight. You think I wanted to spend a holiday weekend dealing with this? I've been on the phone for hours and now I have to come here and do rumor control.

The service will be back up when we have it repaired. I've now said this what, half a dozen times? So that's enough of that.

Posts meant as a joke? No, I think there are truly a number of sick jerks out there who'd like nothing better than to see the system go down and stay down. They take some kind of glee in it. Well they'll have to get their rocks off somewhere else.

When the Amiga was born there were commercial ($pay$) areas on Compuserve, Genie, Delphi, and Bix supporting it. The Web didn't exist. Sites like Amiga.org didn't exist. You had dial-up commercia services, kitchen table BBSes, and Usenet and that was basically it and AmigaZone was competing with some huge industry players. All of them are gone now and AmigaZone was still chugging along.
 
I was writing articles for Amiga magazines when a lot of the people reading boards like this were in diapers. I've been in this business a very long time.

Hey, sorry if my tone sounded mean but I will NOT put up with unfounded, baseless rumors foisted by twits with an agenda. Meanwhile, I have work to do.

Harv

[hrlaser]

cecilia wrote:
I had heard that [insult deleted] had let the payment for the servers or the provider lapse which resulted in the deletion of said files. And I heard this some time ago.

I don't care how long ago you heard it or from whom you heard it. You heard wrong. Payment never lapsed. Not once. Not ever. Files were never deleted. Even if payment did ever lapse (which it never did) the provider wouldn't have deleted the files anyway. They just would have taken it off their network. It was never off their network. Not once. Not ever. Like I said, 99.9999% uptime. The only time the system ever went down in ten years on its current hardware was to perform software updates.

You bought into bullsh*t lies from sick lowlifes with an agenda, and that's all I have to say about it.

Harv

[hrlaser]

Personal attack removed by Wayne

[hrlaser]

irishmike wrote:
@harv

I have no idea about AmigaZone or your workings.  But if you caught a worm, I would reconsider my OS of choice there and go with a very stable UNIX environment that is immune to such nonsense, Especially if I had "poured my heart and soul" into a project for some 21 years of my life.  This is not meant to be an insult or any other form of put down, just stating an opinion so that perhaps in the future you will not have to spend time repairing a server :-)

Then again, I have NO love for Microsoft at all ;-)

Anyhow, a nice FreeBSD (would definitely be my first choice) or Linux server running Apache 2.0x would be great for a site of your nature.

Hope that you view this as constructive criticism and not a put down... because it is wholly meant to help!

Take care,

Mike

AmigaZone, which I started in 1985, originally ran on a mini-mainframe in Chicago on a service called American People/Link. The computer was used mainly for banking services but they leased time/space/storage/bandwidth on it to Plink to run an online service with "clubs." AmigaZone was one of those clubs, grew to be the biggest one with over 10,000 paying members. Plink shut down in 1991 and I moved the system and most of its customers to Portal Communications in Calif.

Portal ran on a Sun Unix system. AmigaZone became a club / forum on Portal and ran successfully there until 1996 until Portal decided to shut down all their consumer services and become an accounting software development house. Go look at http://www.portal.com and you can see what they do.

So, AmigaZone was homeless again and I moved it to an ISP and we built an NT machine and bought the WildCat package to run it on which offers a full range of connection services: telnet, Web, FTP, mail, file libraries, message boards and news feeds, live chats, games, you name it.

I even got Amiga software developers to add a "chat window" to their Telnet clients (people generally don't use Telnet to log into systems for interactive chats) so incoming and outgoing text wouldn't mix with each other and you could send a line at a time instead of a character at a time. AmTelnet and other clients have a chat window because I asked for it to be put in there. Because it generated sales for its developer from AmigaZone members.

People castigated me for not running AmigaZone on an Amiga. Frankly, there WAS no all-in-one Amiga software solution that could do what Wildcat could do. It's been running on that hardware since 1996. There's been no need to upgrade (except for occasional system patches).. since the system was totally stable, could easily handle the load of what members I had left after Commodore went away and the Amiga market shrivelled into nothing (one by one, people switched to differrent platforms).. up until it was hit by a worm last week.

That's the history of the whole thing in a nutshell. The system has been operating under the same name for 21 years, but not on the same hardware, and in three different cities with three different host companies on three totally different hardware platforms and all of this is explained on my Web site, and I guarantee you I'm not going to explain this again.

I'm doing it because it's my baby. If it takes new hardware and a newer OS, then that's what it'll get.

Worms and viruses are evil. The idiots who create them are evil and should be tarred and feathered and castrated live on CNN.

Harv

[hrlaser]

Wayne wrote:
@harv,

Sorry to hear about the worm, but maybe your ISP can do a better job in the future of keeping your system updated.

As for the rest, I think we need to step away from the keyboard before someone gets upset.

Wayne

It isn't the hosting company's responsibility to maintain customer co-lo machines. It's the machine owners' job. Luckily, my friedship with this ISP goes back a very long way so things are being done which I can't do from home and would require a very long trip and a lot of time I don't have to accomplish.

Again, all of these things are irrelevant to the purposes of any of this thread which started out with ridiculous, unfounded, baseless rumors and I've wasted way too much time dealing with this thread already.

Harv
 

[hrlaser]

irishmike wrote:
@harv

Sure, I am familiar with Wildcat, I believe that is a BBS package or is this different software?  Anyhow, I understand what you are saying.  As I said, it is a friendly suggestion, nothing more :-)


I wish you the best however you choose to go forward and I am glad that your project has had the longevity and place of stature in the community.

So my best wishes to you :-)

Mike

We are running a much more upscale version of Wildcat than a basic kitchen table BBS. It costs a lot more and can accomodate many more simultaneous logins and has many more services than the basic package.

It might be old but it's still supported, still upgraded with patches and new features, and still serves its purpose as AmigaZone's platfom quite nicely.

The beauty of it is that you can access it in numerous ways - you can read exactly the same message bases and download exactly the same files (over 100,000 of them) via Telnet with Zmodem, via a Web Browser, or via an FTP client. Our file library has many exclusive files that were never posted anywhere else due to my doing deals with magazines like Compute, Jumpdisk and others to acquire permission to exclusive rights to put their disks and cover disks online for my membership.

Maybe no one really cares anymore about downloading 1985-ish Amiga programs. You'd need an Amiga 1000 with OS 1.3 to run them, or Amiga Forever emulating 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3/2.04/whatever. Maybe some people care. I care. I think it's an important historical archive and I will do whatever is humanly possible to keep the system up and running as long as it's worth doing. When I decide it's no longer worth doing, that's when it'll go away. And not a minute sooner.

The President of Portal said something interesting to me when AmigaZone moved there in 1991. I asked him why he started the company and he said "I like to manage huge amounts of information." I thought it was a strange thing to say at the time, but years later it made very good sense to me. Portal made him a billionaire. It got him on the cover of Fortune magazine as one of the richest (people under some age) in the country.

Running AmigaZone never made me rich. Writing hundreds of articles for 16 magazines, writing Amiga manuals and Editing Amiga books didn't make me rich. AmigaZone is a legacy hobby for me. It's something I'm unwilling to give up. I have some extremely dedicated members who've been with me through all of this and they don't want to see it go away either.

Harv

[hrlaser]

Argus wrote:
Hey Harv!

Keep up the good work.  I remember reading your articles in Amazing Computer many years ago and always loved the Twilight Zone-like theme of your site.  It was really cool then and continues to be.

All the best

Thank you. Kind words for a change.

AmigaZone was named in honor of Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone series (1959-1964) and its main Web site graphic is an homage to the series' opening titles.
It was my favoite show when I was young, and although I've seen every epside dozens of times, I still enjoy it. I thought it was way ahead of its time, just as Rod Serling himself was. He created a bright light of brilliance in a vast wasteland of mediocrity. I had a chance to meet him briefly when I was young (My late Dad knew him well).. and didn't fully comprehend just what a genius he was. He's one of my heroes and that's why the site and the service has the name that it has.

Harv