History of GNHLUG's Internet Presence

The first GNHLUG Internet thingy was a mailing list, gnhlug@zk3.dec.com. The listmaster was Mark Gelinas, who worked in building ZK3 of the now-defunct DEC (Digital Equipment Corp). This was all there was for a long time.

At some point, gnhlug.org got registered as a domain name. I believe Bruce Dawson did this. This was no later than 1999 SEP 10 (per the WHOIS info for the domain, as of 2023 DEC 29).

A website was created. I believe this was also Bruce's original doing. Hosting was provided by Bruce's company, CodeMeta. The website has gone through a few major iterations, including being a blog-like site running the Post-Nuke software, and most recently a wiki via TWiki.

On Wed 7 Aug 2002, the general discussion mailing list was migrated from gnhlug@zk3.dec.com to gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org, again hosted by CodeMeta.

Everything stayed with Bruce and CodeMeta for a long time.

In 2006, the server known as liberty was put into operation. MV Communications generously provided co-location for free. Later MV was bought by G4 Communications, who generously continued this tradition.

The web site was migrated from hive.codemeta.com to liberty on FIXME. The mailing lists were migrated from rogue.codemeta.com to liberty on Sat 2006 Oct 14.

On FIXME, DNS registration was transferred to Cole Tuininga, who was working at DynDNS at the time, and got that stuff for free. On FIXME, DNS hosting was transferred from CodeMeta to liberty, with DynDNS providing secondaries.

Due to disk failure plus admin laziness, in 2008, the server was offline from 23 Oct through 10 Nov.

In 2015 July, G4 (nee MV) was purchased by FirstLight, who immediately demonstrated they were not as generous as their predecessors. They were kicking liberty out. We quickly spun-up a new VM/VPS, christened it justice (get it?), and moved everything over with minimal changes.

Things stayed like that for a long time. Too long.

In 2023 December, TWiki was migrated from liberty to petra, and upgraded from 3.x (2004-09-01) to 6.0.1 (2018-07-16) in the process.