Almost 20 years ago, I was introduced to dirvish by its
author, "jwshultz", as an alternative to cartridge tape
backup. He was very helpful, though reserved and private.
We shared interests in space technology, we both liked the
Perl scripting language. I never met him in person.
I decided the best way to "give back" to jw was to write a
magazine article so others could find out about dirvish.
That turned into a three part article for Sysadmin magazine
in the US, and inspired an article in the German computer
magazine C't.
When I had my first draft of the Sysadmin article, I tried
to contact jw, but he did not respond.
It was a very busy time for me, including running my business
(integrated circuit identification products), helping my wife
with her medical practice, and dealing with my mother's death,
while producing THREE articles for Sysadmin before issue
deadlines. And no corrections or feedback from jw. Yikes!
("I love deadlines. I love the whoosing noise they make
as they go by" - Douglas Adams)
Only later did I discover that Jonathan Shultz had died,
and how. And learn that his parents had erased the
"encrypted" (that is, linux-formatted) disks on his
computers. But all I knew at the time was that his work
needed preservation, so I set up dirvish.org and put
what I could discover on that new website.
At the time, dirvish was used by major organizations
worldwide. A dirvish variant was used by Open Source Labs
at Oregon State University to back up kernel.org itself.
Protecting dirvish was very important.
I am not a programmer. Integrated circuit design, and
running a business, where a mistake can cost millions,
makes me extremely cautious about changes. So I have
been cautious about contributed changes, and skeptical
about major ones - such as a proposal for "push backups",
which gives clients write access to the "crown jewels".
Perhaps dirvish could have evolved faster and better if
I had been more permissive, but I prefer to focus on
preventing disaster.
Especially disasters that risk my own backups - my disks
are rotated into a fireproof safe, and into a bank vault.
I am old. In recent years, that affects my productivity
and sometimes my lucidity. I spent years looking for a
responsible successor, with a couple of failed attempts
at a handover. I need to be personally backed up.
Mike Beattie's offer to take over dirvish has been a
great relief. He's in New Zealand, so dirvish is now
Covid-resistant as well. He's using linode for virtual
hosting (I used New Zealand's rimuhosting), so he can
easily migrate hosting and DNS out of the US plague
zone as well. Delays aside, all's well that ends well.
Please treat Mike gently, and thank him from time to time.
He has a family and children and work, so dirvish is not
his primary responsibility; help him with that. Respect
his decisions, adapt to his adjustments, help find bugs,
and if you cannot adapt - fork. Back Mike up!
If you want push backups, fork your own version and call
that new program hsivrid.
Whichever way you go from here, it's been a wonderful
journey together - you are grand people, one and all.
And, as always, "remember Cernan and Schmitt".
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
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