ZNet Reported Off Line!
anarchist606 | 19.09.2001 21:56
ZNet Reported Off Line! At such an important time the writings of many important commentations such as Chomsky, Zinn and Pilger are off line!
Hello to ZNET's Users,
I don’t quite know how to write this message, I can barely fathom it myself, so I will simply relay the facts as I currently know them.
We have an internet provider out in Washington State. They are very congenial and nice people who have worked very hard for us during the lifetime of our operations. They report being very hard hit by yesterday’s virus attack. They report that of 200 machines in one of their buildings, ZNet’s was by far the hardest hit, they think because of its very high use level at the time. The technicians have been unable to get our machine back on line, even to get it to boot up, even to get it to allow any functionality at all. They have prepared a new server for our operations, but when they tried to insert the old hard drive and read the data from our prior hard drive onto the new server, (thousands upon thousands of files), they were unable to do so. Without getting technical, at the moment they simply cannot access the data from our old drive or even see it, and don't really know, in fact, whether the data is intact or not.
You might wonder, why worry? Why not just restore your backup data to the new server, and if you lose a day or two days of data that wasn’t backed up, and if it takes another day or so for the provider to get operations fully up to speed, that’s all very annoying, of course, but it's certainly not a catastrophe. Just get back online as soon as you can, and then reconstruct from there. Hundreds of thousands of users who have been accessing ZNet from all over the world, particularly in this difficult time, are waiting to regain access.
Well, that’s our attitude as well, and it would be our agenda except that our provider reports that they have no backup of our data.
If you find this last fact incredible, so do I. But that’s the condition they report to us. I can't answer how it could be, I don't know. But the conclusion is that at the moment I don’t know when we will be back online – and that’s assuming they can access the old data at all – much less if they cannot access it. We could be back online with no losses tomorrow. It could be a week including huge losses of content, loss of our sustainer and other databases, etc.
PLEASE do not write to tell me you commiserate or to suggest options. I know you do… but I can’t handle the mail. I will continue to send materials by email to our free update list, at least during this crisis, particularly since I can’t place the materials on line. Hopefully we will get the data and be back shortly.
Sincerely,
Michael Albert
for ZNet
I don’t quite know how to write this message, I can barely fathom it myself, so I will simply relay the facts as I currently know them.
We have an internet provider out in Washington State. They are very congenial and nice people who have worked very hard for us during the lifetime of our operations. They report being very hard hit by yesterday’s virus attack. They report that of 200 machines in one of their buildings, ZNet’s was by far the hardest hit, they think because of its very high use level at the time. The technicians have been unable to get our machine back on line, even to get it to boot up, even to get it to allow any functionality at all. They have prepared a new server for our operations, but when they tried to insert the old hard drive and read the data from our prior hard drive onto the new server, (thousands upon thousands of files), they were unable to do so. Without getting technical, at the moment they simply cannot access the data from our old drive or even see it, and don't really know, in fact, whether the data is intact or not.
You might wonder, why worry? Why not just restore your backup data to the new server, and if you lose a day or two days of data that wasn’t backed up, and if it takes another day or so for the provider to get operations fully up to speed, that’s all very annoying, of course, but it's certainly not a catastrophe. Just get back online as soon as you can, and then reconstruct from there. Hundreds of thousands of users who have been accessing ZNet from all over the world, particularly in this difficult time, are waiting to regain access.
Well, that’s our attitude as well, and it would be our agenda except that our provider reports that they have no backup of our data.
If you find this last fact incredible, so do I. But that’s the condition they report to us. I can't answer how it could be, I don't know. But the conclusion is that at the moment I don’t know when we will be back online – and that’s assuming they can access the old data at all – much less if they cannot access it. We could be back online with no losses tomorrow. It could be a week including huge losses of content, loss of our sustainer and other databases, etc.
PLEASE do not write to tell me you commiserate or to suggest options. I know you do… but I can’t handle the mail. I will continue to send materials by email to our free update list, at least during this crisis, particularly since I can’t place the materials on line. Hopefully we will get the data and be back shortly.
Sincerely,
Michael Albert
for ZNet
anarchist606
e-mail:
anarchist606@hushmail.com
Homepage:
http://www.zmag.org
Comments
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20.09.2001 13:56
by ZeroZero 4:31am Thu Sep 20 '01
Doesn't google hold cached copies of pages in its search engine? Far from a satisfactory solution though. Isn't there some kind of mirror anywhere in the world of the site?
(the above reposted from duplicate story which is being hidden)
btw google has refreshed its cache of front splash page so it's just the same message about server crash - but other pages do exist eg the main page at:
from here you can get the link you want, paste it back into google to get the cache page address then access the cache copy - sadly no use in rescuing the site unless like a 1000 people did it in a co-ordinated way...
maybe google could give zmag their chache archive?
sadly a lot of zmag runs on databases so a lot of stuff will be un chacheable
let's hope their hosts manage to restore the server data
imc
What Michael Albert from Zmag said re US
20.09.2001 14:17
Calamitous Perspective
By Michael Albert
Sending a commentary on a topic other than today?s horrific events has seemed untenable.Addressing today?s events has also seemed untenable. That our web and email server hasbeen inaccessible all day, depriving us of internet communications and of access to update ZNet hasn?t helped. It seems web traffic was so great that it caused problems in Washington State, around Seattle, where our servers are located.
A simple chronicle of the day?s events would be superfluous. Known facts are displayed on every TV station. Reliable deductions are relatively obvious. After routine take-offs four planes were commandeered by terror teams and simultaneously flown on dramatically distorted trajectories to demolish pre-selected targets. The devastation is not yet known, but is certainly horrific. What can one conclude other than that devastating suicidal terrorist attacks are eminently doable? Annihilating skyscrapers in the U.S. or other developed countries is harder than the U.S. bombing cities in targeted nations, but it is evidently far from impossible.
Good-hearted Americans will mourn these innocent and horrible deaths with dignity and with respect. Media analysts and politicians, however, will soon use pictures of the rubble to seek increased police and military spending and greater state interventionary and surveillance powers. They will intone that killing civilians is cowardly and warrants swift and merciless punishment. They will however ignore having themselves supported the recent assault on Yugoslavia that terrorized that country?s civilian population to topple its despised government. They will also ignore that the U.S.-led embargo of Iraq has caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, again to destabilize a hated government. Today?s terrorism was horrendously vile. It arose in a terror-infected world.
People throughout the third world have long had their destiny held hostage by distant rulers. First world diplomats and entrepreneurs year after year pursue power and profit imposing nearly unimaginable third world calamity. Due to our distance from the victims and the endless mass media obfuscation of their plight, we first world citizens fail to realize that when a million people starve because a poor country?s energies are commandeered to benefit multinational capital, it is murder. But, it is murder, and so third world populations have long endured near total dependence on choices made by distant authoritative leaders who are callous to their futures.
The same abysmal condition has arrived, to a degree, for populations in developed countries. Those who died in today?s attacks also suffered a choice made by far away actors callous to the carnage they imposed. First world populations may henceforth share not the degrading conditions and daily poverty of the third world, but some of the fear of being held hostage by others. To try to overcome this condition, but even more to enlarge their already grotesquely bloatedpowers, first world leaders may in coming weeks challenge decades of gains in civil and legal rights, trying to turn back freedom's clock.
Can anything curtail the carnage of capital, the carnage of terrorism, and the carnage of repressive reaction? Our best hope is to win institutional change that reduces profit-seeking and political subordination, while also reducing desires to lash out with mindless and inhumane terrorism.
In coming weeks we may suffer a kind of celebration in America, a celebration of security and of power, a celebration of surreptitious information retrieval, a celebration of arms growth, and perhaps of assassination, all described as virtuous goals rather than uncivil abominations, all touted as if the terror victims will be honored rather than defiled by our preparing to entomb still more innocent people around the world. Normal good-hearted Americans will weep for the suffering that today?s events exacted and hope to create a world in which such hateand callousness disappears. But I fear that America?s leaders will cynically bulk up their ammo belts while seeking to make ubiquitous their listening devices?trying to relegate public freedoms to an incinerator.
In this environment, people of good will must explain as often as necessary that terrorism is horrific and insane, but so too is capitalist business as usual. And we must not step back from dissent, but must instead work harder to oppose all kinds of injustice with massive public demonstrations and civil disobedience.
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