Yes, it’s true! Blinkenshell has been online for more than 3 years already, it’s hard to believe. The domain name blinkenshell.org was actually registered on the 10th of August 2006.
We’ve certainly had our ups and downs, but we’ve survived this far and I’m sure we can keep on going for many years to come. I know my activity with the project has been a bit on and off, and the last couple of months I’ve not been around much. I’m sorry for this. However, the community seems to be alive and kicking. The IRC channel is active night and day, and I think this shows how strong this community really is, I’m really impressed. Thanks to all you guys who keeps this thing alive, even when I’m away!
Blinkenshell has certainly been growing too, we’ve just recently passed 400 members. Not bad with that long-ass signup process! 😉
Much has changed since Blinkenshell started up 3 years ago, but one thing that has been the same all this time is that poor old server in my parents basement. It’s really incredible that it has survived all this time. Not even one harddrive has failed. And the hardware was not new to start with.
Lately though, it seems like the network connection has been a bit shaky. It seems like the network connection goes down for a few hours every week pretty regularly.
That’s why I’ve been thinking of buying a new server, and placing it at my new apartment. I’ve been hesitating to do this before because I’ve been moving around a lot. I’ve moved 5 times in the last year alone. But I think I’ll be staying at my new place for a couple of years atleast.
So, what does the Blinkenshell community think, is it time to invest in a new server? As always, any help is much appreciated. Ideas for how to make things better, any particular hardware configurations you think would be good, and of course donations to help pay for the new hardware 😉 The Internet connection to my apartment is 100/10 Mbit/s currently, but I think we have to bounce it via some tunnel provider to get static IPv4 and reverse etc, so maybe it will be something like 10/10 Mbit/s. Still a lot better than what we currently have!
If you have any ideas or questions, feel free to contact me by commenting on this blog post, chat me up on IRC (pm is ok!), or by sending me an email: independence at blinkenshell.org
Happy anniversary everyone! 😀
Congratulations! I’m new in this comunity but i’ll be here for a long time cause is a really nice place to talk about everything even non-geek stuff but with smart people.
And i guess is a nice filter that long ass signup process, because only people who is really interested remains, even if they are not very active at IRC.
I guess it could be more important that networking upgrade before hadware. But upgrading hardware will be nice too. I hope i can contribute with something 🙂 Good work, and thanks for everything.
ye, congrats from me too..
maybe with that new, planned server we could get a new, updated OS for a change..
something more actively developed and maintained.. like Arch or Debian 🙂
i’d prefer Arch because of its exclusive i686 and x86_64 optimization, kickass docs and most important dream-2-maintainness 🙂
keep up, thumbs up for upgrade <3
purpler: Are there any specific software on Blinkenshell that you think is not up to date? I think programs that many people use like irssi is at much more recent versions than what you would get with Debian.
Programs are optimized now, but the main consideration for Blinkenshell is security.
idk, it was just suggestion 🙂
gentoo seems like quite an overkill for such thing as shell server imho..
i mentioned changing of OS just as an option, gentoo seems old-ish and boring these days 🙂
arch has quite big community and skilled technical staff and i expect it to perform far more better than gentoo..
Imho, I don’t think we, the users, will notice any difference if Blinkenshell changes to another distro.
Personally (in an admin’s perspective) I prefer Gentoo over Arch just because it’s more customizeable (compare binary packages to source packages, etc).
I hope I’m not starting some distro flameware here 😉
Anyways, what I’m looking forward to the most is the upgrade of the Internet connection 😀