If the homebrew server club had an official membership based on technicality, then I would be a very proud member, but it does not have a membership application. That being said, I am still a proud member of HBSC, as I’ve been running a home server for a decade now.
I can’t say that it’s been easy, but it has been evolving. When I tried setting up my first server, I had issues with an ISP that didn’t allow me to have more than a single public static IP address.
Over time, ISPs changed, servers have changed, but the only thing that remained the same is me running my server from my home.
Now, I do have multiple IPs, a VLAN with my ISP that we’ve agreed on the setup, an internal email where they answer my questions without me calling the general support line and finally a publicly available Looking Glass that anyone can use.
Unfortunately, it’s not all sunshine and roses. My biggest request for the last couple of years has been the same: a status page.
You know, that simple web page that tells you if a service is down?
Interestingly, when I was researching ISPs (that’s a post for another day) I noticed that most ISPs don’t provide a status page.
Some ISPs (like Google Fiber) ask for an address, while others ask you to log in.
I understand that an ISP is a complex beast, and it would not be an easy task to say “we have an issue”, but hey, someone has to start trying.
Oh, I forgot, the downtime mentioned in the title!
Well, my personal blogs don’t have a lot of traffic (unless if someone posts a link to the Orange Website, then I get 20K+ viewers per day), but many people use my services, such as my Jabber/XMPP chat server, a publicly available blogging system an Armenian tech forum and so on.
All of the local ISPs had issues this week and their first response was to fix the outbound traffic. So for most people in the country, they didn’t care, as long as they were able to use Telegram and log into their Meta-owned social media services.
But for me and my community, we had to wait almost 18 hours for them to fix the internal network issues.
However, I am still a proud member of HBSC, because unlike Big Tech companies, if I go down, only I go down. But if a cloud goes down, everyone goes down with them.
See you at the next downtime π