Starship update: April 18

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

This is an update on the current status of starship.python.net; here
is bad news, very bad news, and a little bit of good news.

First, the bad news: The hard drive on starship is toast; it makes
nasty rattling noises when the power is turned on.

The very bad news is that there do not seem to be any backups, because
no one ever volunteered to set them up.  The most recent data we have
is the data that was on an older disk drive, which went out of service
back in 1998.

The good news: a new disk has been put into the machine, a clean
install of Linux done, and the machine should be online again
tomorrow.  Creating user accounts will take longer, of course.  These
newly created accounts will all have empty directories, since the data
hasn't been restored.  Setting up the Web server again will take
longer still.

A data recovery firm has been contacted to reconstruct the data from
the hard drive; their service costs around US$300-1000 if the data is
recovered successfully, and is free if nothing is recovered.  We'll
probably wind up asking for donations to cover the cost, if they
manage to recover the data.

In the meantime... 

   * If you can recover your starship data through other means
     (google.com's caching, your Web browser cache, copies on your own
     computer, etc.), please do so immediately, before the caches get
     expired.

   * If you had downloadable files on Starship (such as software)
     which you no longer have copies of, you might want to post to
     comp.lang.python or the appropriate mailing list and ask if
     anyone grabbed a copy recently.

   * If you downloaded someone else's software from Starship before
     the crash, DO NOT DELETE IT; your copy might be the only one
     left.  This is particularly true for packages that are no longer 
     under active development; you might consider e-mailing the author 
     to check if they still have a copy.

Further updates will be posted as events warrant.

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/
Our sister died. But we never took revenge. We knew there'd be trouble one
day, her being mortal. It's not as if we never said anything. We still miss
her. We still mourn.
  -- Stheno, in SANDMAN #60: "The Kindly Ones:4"