On physicality

At the bottom of the front page of Yin Feng's gopherhole is the

disclaimer:

=> ===================================================================

This Server may be powered-down during lightning storms, which

are common in my region. It will be restored when the weather passes.

=> ===================================================================

Even before Yin Feng's recent return to active phlogging, I have

stopped by his gopherhole before and I have always found this

notice deeply charming. It is positively quaint, and I don't

mean that in a patronising or condescending way.

I love this warning because it is a cloud burster. We are

increasingly encouraged to think of computing as such ephemeral

and intangibile, which happens "in the cloud". The internet is

just some kind of magic and the stuff we read on it is "just out

there somewhere".

But this is not true. Yin Feng's gopherhole is not "out there".

it is, in its entirety, confined to well less than one cubic

square meter of space, located in the same house as Yin Feng the

human being, plugged into the very same 110V or 240V power circuit

as the toaster. Possibly, if standing in the right place, Yin

Feng can hear it. Certainly, it could be lifted up and turned

upside down.

My own personal server was once like this, living under my desk,

until I moved overseas and migrated it to a VPS. This is very

convenient, in that I can move house without any downtime and I

don't have to worry about blackouts brining down my site. But at

the same time, I kind of miss my server being a physical thing

that I had actually seen and touched and felt some kind of

connection to. Something I had direct physical ownership and

control of.

I mentioned recently that I had a surplus Raspberry Pi and that I

might install a gopher server on it. I had been hoping to host it

at home to recover some of this feeling. Alas, as I mentioned

even more recently, my home internet connection is not direct from

the phoneline but part of some kind of building-wide LAN. I have

no access to the actual internet-facing hardware so I can't set up

port forwarding. So there goes that idea.