[Harp-L] 2 years and counting

[owner-harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx]

Yesterday marked the 2nd year of harp-l being hosted by Rimu Hosting,
www.rimuhosting.com  It's been a relatively glitch free 2 years and all of
the major problems we've had were self inflicted.  For the first time in a
very long time harp-l has been up on the net continuously.  We've gone
down occasionally but never for more than about a half hour or so and when
we did go down none of the list traffic was lost, in a word it has been
seamless.

Harp-l turns 14 on the 6th of October this year.  We were started by a
visionary named Chris Pierce who hosted the list on the Western Kentucky
University server long before the first real browser Mosaic had appeared
on the scene.  After Chris graduated we were forced to seek a new host and
we landed at garply.com with Hugh Messenger running the show.  This was
the era of rapid expansion for the list but it also brought the beginning
of the black outs.  We stayed at garply even after Hugh left both the list
and the host.  As garply went through changes of ownership and name harp-l
became more and more unreliable.  Eventually garply really ceased to exist
and so did we in a sense because we were down for over a month.  By this
time we'd stopped compiling the archives and the ones we had were no
longer accessible.  Ultimately the list moved to Value Priced Hosting for
about a 2 year stay.  Things were better but still quite rocky.  A disk
crash cost us all of our set up and because we didn't have root access at
this site we had no way of reconfiguring the system to remove the
problematic HTML that was beginning to plague the list.  Our promised
archives never materialised.  It was a difficult time to be the listowner.
 From one day to the next you never knew if the list would be up or
working correctly and we had absolutely no control over what was
happening.


Pretty much at the darkest hour I got a subscriber e-mail asking about a
broken feature, I replied and a dialogue ensued.  From this dialogue hope
emerged.  I'd already decided there was no way harp-l could continue with
the present host but I had not a clue as to how to migrate the list.  The
subscriber was of course Ben Nathanson.  His collaboration was
instrumental in harp-l becoming as reliable as it is today.  We tried
another hosting company initially but that didn't work out because we
couldn't get true root access with them.  Somehow we stumbled upon rimu. 
We obtained access to the harp-l.org domain and set up an alternate list
where with a few beta test subscribers we worked out the kinks.  We went
live with the project 2 years ago yesterday and things have never been the
same since.  The archives have been restored and we use modern list
software that is easy for both the user and the administrators of the
system.  My thanks to everyone for being such wonderful subscribers,
harp-l is just a software set without the interactions.  On behalf of the
harp-l team, fjm