Recent blog posts

Google reinstates federated instant messaging

We want to commend Google for doing the right thing.

Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose?

Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains. That would be unthinkable.

LibreWRT: What we use for wifi at the FSF

I would like to take a few moments to introduce Buffalo, the access point and router which provides network connectivity to portable computers in the FSF's office.

World IPv6 day

June 6th, 2012 is World IPv6 Day. The most important GNU/FSF sites are available on native IPv6.

GNU/FSF servers are moving

The GNU/FSF servers are moving between February 22nd and March 1st, 2012. There will be service interruptions during that period. There will be a multi-hour outage for most services on February 28th, 2012, starting at 10am EST (UTC/GMT -5).

Can you help the FSF get colocated hosting?

If you know a Boston-area company or institution that could offer us colocated hosting and bandwidth, we could use your help!

Introducing the systems team summer intern

Hi! My name is Martin Dluhos and I am very fortunate to have an opportunity to intern with the systems team at the FSF this summer.

Behind the scenes of the new GNU mailing list server

The GNU list server is a monster machine serving lists.gnu.org, lists.nongnu.org and a few other domains. Every day, it spools out over 1 million messages for 2700 mailing lists. Until April 11, our venerable list server was an 8-year old Fedora Core 2 (!) box equipped with 6 high-speed SCSI drives organized in two RAID packs to maximize I/O bandwidth. These drives were incessantly cranking every day, as Mailman forwarded incoming posts to thousands of subscribers over a saturated T1 uplink at the FSF headquarters.