2002-06-20 18:43:52+00 by TC 2 comments
This reminds me of a question that some of you wiser types might know. What is the legality of caching? Google obviously does it. It would not be much trouble to whip up a LWP script that copies pages locally to the Flutterby server. Disk space is pretty cheap but I'm not sure what that would do bandwidth wise. Suggestions?? Maybe we could start wearing ribbons to raise funds to stamp out linkrot...
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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2002-06-20 21:40:22+00 by: Dan Lyke
I've thought about doing this a couple of times. I don't think it'd be an issue bandwidth-wise, because it'd only be an issue when we determined a link was no longer there. Disk space might actually be a bit of an issue, we've got 5k entries now, and the entry rate is only getting faster. I don't have ballpark for number of cached links per entry, but we could be talking gigabytes fairly quickly, which would mean that I'd have to get back to 'nooga to put a few more SCSI drives on the RAID array.
Legality is why I've always stopped, as things like NPR's linking policy show, there's nowhere that a bunch of asshole lawyers (pardon the repetition) won't try to convince the pointy haired ones to dispense with a few billable hours.
On the other side, this somewhat ties into yesterday's musings about virtual immortality. Should I be taking steps to preserve Flutterby in the event of my demise? I could probably set up a trust to keep bandwidth going essentially forever, but at some point issues like data migration and all the issues with the archival properties of digital files could become very costly, very fast.
(Speaking of which, for giggles I decided to try to ssh into my old colo box, which Mike had graciously kept on for a few weeks during the migration while I copied data across. It's gone, I hope those involved gave it to a worthy cause, but that I imagined that cruft could still be on says something about my expectations of the net.)
#Comment made: 2002-06-21 17:27:22+00 by: TC
Yeah I had similar thoughts about Flutterby and I'm glad to help out with some scsi drives.The good news is I think you set up RAID 1 which means the swaping should be easy. I find it interesting that out of the thousands of people that read Flutterby nobody knows somebody that has done this or knows of a legal preceedent that has been set. I also had some thoughts on archivng off the main servers (add it to the lunch agenda)