Funtoo is powered down -- but we'll be okay.

[Daniel Robbins]

All,

Today, I was told this morning by the person (Mr. B) "holding" our servers in his datacenter against our will, that he would cut power to the funtoo.org server at 1 PM today, unless I agreed exactly to his terms of repayment in writing before that time.

He was attempting to charge us way above market rates for hosting, sending me the extremely high pricing on April 2, 2014 and attempting to make it retroactive over the past year. He wanted $2590 + tax to cover power consumption for 2 200W servers for a year (do the math, that's about market rate for a full hosting bill, not just power, for 4U at a *full-service* 24/7 access datacenter, and we just had our servers in a room with no physical access) and the total bill he concocted was just shy of $10K. So apparently, being charged $2590 + tax is being presented as some kind of bargain.

Since he is incredibly unreasonable and uncompromising, quite unfriendly, and totally resisting any efforts to work this out amicably, I decided to take him at his word and plan for the server to be powered off. 

I had about a 3 hour window to perform final backups and then wipe drives, which I did. Funtoo.org is now offline.

That's the bad news. But here's the good news. 

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen) is providing assistance to get the equipment back and resolve this issue. On the phone today, after the servers had been turned off, he advised me that we should not even discuss any repayment with this guy until he returns the Funtoo servers in good working order. Period. We should not tolerate him withholding the servers from us and using them as leverage.

Shortly after this, I received an email from our notorious Mr. B, and he wants to charge us $75/mo/server "storage fee" for our servers, and put them on CraigsList for sale if we do not pay in 3 months. This guy doesn't get it. We will see what Eben Moglen thinks about this scheme.

As this drama unfolds... guess what? Funtoo is not on these servers anymore, so it can be treated as a back-water sideshow as we are now free of his control and able to move ahead at full speed with Funtoo.

We are working on deploying a geographically diverse, next-generation Funtoo infrastructure. Funtoo.org will be offline for a few days, but will be returning in relatively short order. We are finding good partners to work with who are truly supportive of Open Source, and are ethical in their business dealings. I want to continue to offer containers to Funtoo supporters. I think that is a great thing to do, and we were just apparently doing it in a hostile environment. 

So that's the update! :)

-Daniel

[Mason Hauk]

Daniel,
     I'm glad this happened. There are many reasons for this, but primary I dont like bullies. Especially ones like ISPs and hosting companies that think they know what their doing so they can act/treat/deal with people yes PEOPLE, as they please. I hope the best for you and your distro in the future, and it has been a pleasure doing business with you. I will continue to support Funtoo in anyway possible. I'm currently in the process of installing to new rig. I feel it's only right to give back what has been given to me. As much help I've had from Funtoo.org / #Funtoo @ irc.freenode.net; it's only right for me to. So let me know how I can help.

Mason M. Hauk

[Marc 'Judge' Richter]

Sad to read you are having this kind of trouble :( Thanks for investing this much of your efford to Funtoo!

[Marc Grondin]

This is sad to hear that someone would act in this way. If i had servers/a hosting company i would host you for free(not that saying this helps) but i am glad you have found other partners to bring you back up. Thank you for the update and all your work in general funtoo is the best.

[Aleksey Frolov]

Hell, I wanted printing and installing Funtoo on this weekend. from wiki-manual 'Building a Kernel from Source' and 'Installation (Tutorial)'

[Guy Fontaine]

Is it possible to host GIT repository on Funtoo Québec ? I could try to get in touch with Laurent.

2014-04-20 11:21 GMT-04:00 Aleksey Frolov <atom...@gmail.com>:

Hell, I wanted printing and installing Funtoo on this weekend. from wiki-manual 'Building a Kernel from Source' and 'Installation (Tutorial)'

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[Daniel Robbins]

Guy, I am working on restoring the git repositories on a temporary server, and making progress there. Main purpose is to get development work started again.

We are close to ready to go there. There is a delay on Portage tree updates due to Gentoo's CVS tree being offline right now. Otherwise, we are fairly close to getting Portage tree updates going.

The wiki, forums, bug tracker will take more time, and the automated builds of stage3's will probably be the last part to be restored.

-Daniel

[Guy Fontaine]

Thanks for those latest news.