[blag-whereto] shutdown/removal of blag vm

Alexandre Oliva lxoliva at fsfla.org
Thu Sep 19 02:16:57 UTC 2013


[adding the blag list]

Hi, Ward,

On Sep 17, 2013, Ward Vandewege <ward at fsf.org> wrote:

> RMS mentioned that you'd like to shut down the blag VM.

It's not so much that I'd like to; quite the opposite.  I just told him
what the status was and asked for help in enlisting volunteers to bring
it back to life, because it would be very useful for me if BLAG carried
on, but I can't undertake the effort of maintaining it by myself :-(

The problem is that I don't think it's responsible to keep an
unmaintained server connected to the Internet without security updates
for so long, and since I'm the person who requested the VM and signed up
as responsible for it, I must live up to the responsibility and do
something about it.

BLAG has not had updates or new releases for a couple of years, if not
more, and I don't know that anyone has been working on such things; I'm
told by other blag maintainers that by now users and developers have
moved on to other distros, or to Fedora with the Freed-ora builds of GNU
Linux-libre, and BLAG is dead :-(

So, this email should be taken as a call for volunteers who'd like to
organize and take over its maintainership, so as to stop us from
bringing the unmaintained server down.

Another possibility, in case there's still a community using the forum,
the server, whatever, is to upgrade the server to Fedora 19, minus the
proprietary server in it, and the Freed-ora kernel.  Of course, it
wouldn't make sense to undertake that effort if it wouldn't be used.


> Is there any data on the VM that you would like to preserve?

Thanks for asking.  I have my own backups of the server, that I'll
probably keep around for a while, but others might want to copy
something out too.

So, this email may also be regarded as a chance for people who want to
copy stuff out of the server to do so.

8~-(

How about we tentatively schedule the blag server shutdown to the end of
the month?  Barring signs that the, erhm, patient is not dead, of course
;-)

Thanks,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist      Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer



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