Gondolin has fallen!

Before start assuming I’m about to make some sociopolitical metaphor about an ideal or institution and Tolkien’s subcreation: Gondolin was my web and database server I used to help host the forums for Cynical Studios.

Cynical Studios is the flash movies web site of my fiancee’s brothers. I had a beige G3 Power Mac running Debian GNU/Linux behind their home router. There were many problems including DHCP throwing the router’s forwarding off and their ISP blocking web serving ports, but what finally killed Gondolin was a hard drive crash. That really annoyed me because I put all this work into fixing one problem, and another would pop up, like trying to get a bubble out of wallpaper. Then there was something that was just completely gone.

In the end, it just wound up not being worth fixing, so I moved the forums to Jacob, the same Biola server that hosts philisha.net. It’s too bad, because now I’m just stuck deeper in the Biola Bubble. Before if I had some kind of problem with Biola’s connection, I could always just ssh over to Gondolin and see what things were like over there. For instance, my friend Josh Brown’s blog Expressed Thoughts is frequently inaccessible because Biola’s name servers just plain forget how to get to it sometimes. (idiocy) When I had Gondolin, I could just go there to look up the IP address, and then I’d be good to go.

Bah!