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Thanks to the wonderment that is Google Apps for Your Domain (Yes, the beta is still taking sign-ups) I have been able to cobble together a pseudo-answer for the problem I faced after Friday's failure of panther and my subsequent announcement that I am shutting down and leaving the hosting business. So, for the moment, I have the ability to keep receiving email via my personal e-mail address and put up an explanation on the front page. All thanks to a side project run by a search engine. Sadly, the webserver component for Google Apps doesn't support virtual hosts that might point at my explanation page via their own URL, so it's not a complete solution. But it's still better than where I was two hours ago.

Google, your powers are truly mighty. I just wish I didn't have to turn to them because of a situation like this.

sometimes

Personal server has been acting crappy for the last few days. This morning it locked up when I opened pine -- a perfectly reasonable thing to lock up on, don't you agree? -- and when the hosting provider went to reboot it they found the motherboard/processor was fried. Install new motherboard and processor, turn the unit back on and away we go. Should be set, right? Wrong. It locked up again at around 5:30 tonight. This time it was the hard drive that failed. Again. Which I believe means I have won some sort of trifecta of technological suck. It's like an inverse lottery -- hit all the numbers and you lose. So there's a freshly installed operating system and none of the data could be saved. Didn't I do this already, back in July?

I believe that this is a sign that I am not cut out for this "job" of running a personal hosting service any longer. Add in that I'm frustrated and tired of doing this "oh SHIT explosion quick put all the pieces back together!" dance on a steadily more frequent basis (before July the last big melt-down was in November of 2005. This is getting harder as time goes on and my life places other demands on me, such as my job, my relationship, my house, etc. I am tired of putting my hard-earned cash into this server and having all these problems with no hope of recouping any of the expenses I incur on a monthly or per-incident basis. Most of all I'm tired of the responsibility: For the last five years or more I have been hosting other people's websites, e-mail and games -- which makes me responsible for maintaining this ongoing nightmare.

I give up. I can't do this anymore, I just don't have anything left in me.

I'll send whatever data I can recover to everyone who had websites hosted on there. In the mean time any address ending in "@black-panther.us" is boned and unreachable. Same goes for any other domain I hosted.

it all fell apart

So now I get to add that to the list of things that (desperately) need my attention to be given to them.

I run a hosting service why? Oh yeah, I do it because of my love of technology.... except when it fails and roaches a drive in a machine that's half a continent away from me.

I should just convert my office at home into a proto-datacenter and be done with it.