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At any rate, I talked at TZ for a long time. A long, long time. I met many wonderful people and faces, and it was a great medium to keep in contact with friends on. After awhile, I learned that the code that runs the place was downloadable....free! I couldn't believe it, and immediately I downloaded it and started messing with it. I first brought TFB up at a server called Scott. Scott was (is) an SGI IRIX 100mHz machine located in the computer labs at Luther College. I ran TFB from my computer science account, and since the machines are administrated very poorly, noone noticed one little ol' process running in the background. I started telling my friends and net friends, and business grew...slowly but surely. Soon I had superusers, lots of chat going on, etc. Scott wasn't the best server in the world. Since it was in a computer lab, it was frequently rebooted (whether by choice or accident) by students, and I had to constantly monitor the talker to make sure that if it went down, I could get it rebooted. Also, since it was running IRIX, a really odd flavor of Unix (but standard to SGI, go figure), it had compilation problems and it was constantly prone to bad compiles and hated me editing the code. So I didn't edit much. And, as anyone can tell you, not editing a talker doesn't help the popularity. Well, things like this can only be hid for so long, and soon the system administrators found out about it and told me to (re)move it. I was pressed; I didn't want to move the talker, and yet I had to. I was afraid I was going to have to shut it down and chalk it up as another talker lost in the wash of the 'net, doomed from the start. But I like to go out kicking... In came Rhianna from The Castle, who offered me space on her account on the Imperial server out in New Jersey. I accepted and TFB moved within a week. It was nice...the code compiled more regularly and didn't give me weird errors, the server and connection was fast (most of the time), and the people were friendly. The Imperial server was a Pentium running BSD. TFB continued to flourish for a while. Through a series of events, mainly involving superuser wars and dissatisfied users, TFB lost users and for a time had a long downtime spell where things did not go well. Added on top of this, one day Imperial was locked out to us, and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out that through a series of politics, the account that was hosting TFB wasn't being paid for, and the admin torched the account. Luckily, I was able to recover the code from the admin (bless him). The next question was...what now? Luckily for everyone, Lore had just gotten DSL to his house and had a Linux server that he said we could use. I transferred the code and redirect address and we were off and running again. We did lose some users in the move, as the net conditions changed for them and they decided to leave. Additionally, the original redirect we used (tfb.ml.org) was discontinued, so we have to find something else (and our users lost track of how to get to us). We ran on Lore's server until the opportunity for me to admin a server in Texas came. We are now located on Binhost Technologies' main server, which is an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz running Debian. TFB originally started out as NUTS 3.2.2 but has been modified so heavily that it is now it's own entity. We are currently running version 7.0. Thank you to all the people who have ever helped out to make this place what it is, and especially to our users for chatting here! :) Ribbon Chancellor 21 February 2005 |
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