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acorn.riscos.com gone? |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118487, posted by PaulV at 19:47, 24/8/2011 |
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Posts: 135
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So it seems I'm seeing 404 errors... The site is gone?  |
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Andrew Rawnsley |
Message #118489, posted by arawnsley at 21:18, 24/8/2011, in reply to message #118487 |
R-Comp chap
Posts: 594
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PaulV, you have unfortunate initials for the RISC OS world... I thought for a minute I saw a ghost, and had to do a spit take!
As to the message, I'm getting a similar "URL / not found on this server" message, as if someone has deleted index.html
My guess is that they're having some problem with hosting, and it is being gradually restored from backup or something. Or, someone botched a site update! |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #118490, posted by andypoole at 21:32, 24/8/2011, in reply to message #118489 |
Posts: 5558
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PaulV, you have unfortunate initials for the RISC OS world... I thought for a minute I saw a ghost, and had to do a spit take! Hm, I was thinking that, too.
As to the message, I'm getting a similar "URL / not found on this server" message, as if someone has deleted index.html
My guess is that they're having some problem with hosting, and it is being gradually restored from backup or something. Or, someone botched a site update! Well following links to that site from google (put "acorn.riscos.com" into the search box) also results in 404, which suggests that the site has been emptied. I'd guess either ROL didn't pay their hosting bill and their host cleared the site, or they've emptied it themselves.
They do still link to it from their homepage, however their site in general is pretty awful (and always has been). In Chrome, clicking *any* of the links on the homepage has no effect whatsoever and the site is completely unbrowsable. I'd try another browser, but I can't be bothered. |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118491, posted by PaulV at 21:38, 24/8/2011, in reply to message #118489 |
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PaulV, you have unfortunate initials for the RISC OS world... I thought for a minute I saw a ghost, and had to do a spit take! Ah yes, understandable... But I am indeed not the other Paul V. In fact, I can prove it, we met at the MUG show earlier this year and talked about old VHS/Betamax video recorders for a while 
As to the message, I'm getting a similar "URL / not found on this server" message, as if someone has deleted index.html Yes, all the files are gone. I have a few direct links to useful files and they're not there now... Uniboot for instance.
My guess is that they're having some problem with hosting, and it is being gradually restored from backup or something. Or, someone botched a site update! It's odd. The other riscos.com subdomains are all working. To just remove one site seems to me to be more deliberate especially when that one is meant to be an untouched archive...
Paul |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118492, posted by PaulV at 21:39, 24/8/2011, in reply to message #118490 |
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. I'd guess either ROL didn't pay their hosting bill and their host cleared the site, or they've emptied it themselves. I'm thinking emptied themselves....
Paul |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #118493, posted by andypoole at 21:52, 24/8/2011, in reply to message #118492 |
Posts: 5558
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. I'd guess either ROL didn't pay their hosting bill and their host cleared the site, or they've emptied it themselves. I'm thinking emptied themselves....
Yeah, I'd be more inclined to believe that than their host being silly.
The bigger question is: Will they bother putting it back again? Yes, a lot of the stuff is *old*, but then it was always useful to have around (ie, for copies of uniboot or earlier RO resources for older machines). |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118494, posted by PaulV at 23:01, 24/8/2011, in reply to message #118493 |
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The bigger question is: Will they bother putting it back again? That's the question indeed. I hope they do if only to allow someone to mirror the content.... |
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Phil Mellor |
Message #118496, posted by monkeyson2 at 10:18, 25/8/2011, in reply to message #118494 |
 Please don't let them make me be a monkey butler
Posts: 12380
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Bah! First time in years I've needed to use this site and now it's gone!
( Trying to find a screenshot of a RISC OS Filer action window - copying with pause buttons etc - to compare to the new Windows 8 version: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/23/improving-our-file-management-basics-copy-move-rename-and-delete.aspx ) |
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Philip Webster |
Message #118497, posted by pwx at 10:48, 25/8/2011, in reply to message #118494 |
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Was the FTP mirror the same as the one distributed on one of the Acorn User CDs? |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #118499, posted by trevj at 10:56, 25/8/2011, in reply to message #118496 |
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screenshot of a RISC OS Filer action window - copying with pause buttons etc There's one on the ROOL wiki and don't forget the recent enhancements. |
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Bryan Hogan |
Message #118505, posted by helpful at 13:38, 26/8/2011, in reply to message #118496 |
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Posts: 249
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...the new Windows 8 version... Oh dear oh dear :-(
Yet more colourful screen space wasting, cpu eating nonsense, rather than getting the basics right or just speeding the bloated heap of ****. |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #118506, posted by trevj at 16:27, 26/8/2011, in reply to message #118505 |
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[...] bloated heap of ****. ... Careful! |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118553, posted by PaulV at 14:34, 5/9/2011, in reply to message #118487 |
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Posts: 135
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Just to let people know, I've managed to spend a lot of time on archive sites and have rebuilt 99% of the acorn.riscos.com website from various caches of data strewn around the web.
I've launched it as an unofficial mirror site here:
http://archive.retro-kit.co.uk/acorn.riscos.com/
Paul |
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Chris Williams |
Message #118561, posted by diodesign at 20:31, 5/9/2011, in reply to message #118553 |
 The Opposition
Posts: 269
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Just to let people know, I've managed to spend a lot of time on archive sites and have rebuilt 99% of the acorn.riscos.com website from various caches of data strewn around the web. If you haven't already taken a look, you might be able to find some missing bits from http://www.drobe.co.uk/archives/acorn.riscos.com/ |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118562, posted by PaulV at 01:05, 6/9/2011, in reply to message #118561 |
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Posts: 135
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Sadly, the area that I'm missing files from is even less populated on the drobe archive than it is on mine...
http://archive.retro-kit.co.uk/acorn.riscos.com/documents/
http://www.drobe.co.uk/archives/acorn.riscos.com/documents/
Paul |
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Chris Evans |
Message #118568, posted by CJE at 15:41, 6/9/2011, in reply to message #118562 |
CJE Micros chap
Posts: 228
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Having spoken to RISC OS Ltd they didn't know of the problem, they think it will be quite easy to fix. Though other commitments mean it probably won't be sorted for 10 days or so.
[Edited by CJE at 15:42, 6/9/2011] |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118575, posted by PaulV at 21:34, 6/9/2011, in reply to message #118568 |
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Posts: 135
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That's twice in less than a year that the acornftp site has disappeared :-/
It also begs the question:
Why aren't they monitoring their sites?
I get text messages if any of the servers I manage are unavailable or providing an incorrect response for more than 2 minutes... It's not expensive and it's not rocket science!
Paul |
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Chris Evans |
Message #118578, posted by CJE at 09:58, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118575 |
CJE Micros chap
Posts: 228
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That's twice in less than a year that the acornftp site has disappeared :-/
It also begs the question:
Why aren't they monitoring their sites?
I get text messages if any of the servers I manage are unavailable or providing an incorrect response for more than 2 minutes... It's not expensive and it's not rocket science!
Paul Well it must have been very easy as it is all back up now!
Apparently it is all on one server, so presumably a simple server not responding test wouldn't work. |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118579, posted by PaulV at 10:28, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118578 |
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Posts: 135
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No but site monitoring would. :-/ |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #118580, posted by filecore at 11:16, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118579 |
Posts: 3867
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No but site monitoring would. :-/ Yes yes, let's not debate the level of skill on what is basically an enthusiast website. I'm sure you can do better than them, but I'm sure they probably don't care too much if a small bunch of retro enthusiasts can't get access to decade-and-a-half old apps for a while. If you really feel so strongly about it, perhaps you should submit a tender for contracting to them, rather than filling up this thread with argumentation on what is the best server management strategy. |
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Philip Webster |
Message #118584, posted by pwx at 13:53, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118580 |
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Posts: 227
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If you really feel so strongly about it, perhaps you should submit a tender for contracting to them, rather than filling up this thread with argumentation on what is the best server management strategy. A network of authorised mirror sites would do the job. I'd be happy to mirror the lot on my own web space - it's not exactly a huge archive, and I suspect the demand isn't such that the server would be overloaded... |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #118585, posted by filecore at 16:05, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118584 |
Posts: 3867
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Fair enough, and easy to do. I have my own mirror of it, and the directory structure looks more like Drobe's copy than Paul Vernon's one, so I guess it's older and missing a few things. Mine weighs in at a little less than 100MB. |
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Chris Evans |
Message #118586, posted by CJE at 17:08, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118562 |
CJE Micros chap
Posts: 228
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Sadly, the area that I'm missing files from is even less populated on the drobe archive than it is on mine...
http://archive.retro-kit.co.uk/acorn.riscos.com/documents/
http://www.drobe.co.uk/archives/acorn.riscos.com/documents/
Paul I guess retro-kit.co.uk is your domain?
Many people now quote URLs without the www. I was wondering why:
Oops! Firefox could not find retro-kit.co.uk
Did you mean: www.retro-kit.co.uk
? |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #118587, posted by filecore at 17:39, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118586 |
Posts: 3867
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Many people now quote URLs without the www. I was wondering why:
Oops! Firefox could not find retro-kit.co.uk
Did you mean: www.retro-kit.co.uk
? Actually the mistake there is your own. He quoted it with an accurate subdomain (archive.retro-kit.co.uk) rather than its www main domain. However, most servers are set up to make www and non-www versions of the principal domain interchangeable; and for those that aren't, it's trivial to add a ReWriteRule to a .htaccess file, or similar. The occasional few actually serve different content for non-www versions, but that's really quite uncommon.
As to quoting them without the www prefix, yes that's becoming common. It wouldn't be a problem if web servers were properly set up (as above), which they aren't always, and if people understood that a subdomain can be used in lieu of a www - but not generally in addition to it. The number of times I've directed people to something like acorn.filecore.net and they've told me it doesn't work, and later on I've discovered they've been going to www.acorn.filecore.net... gah, it's annoying.
EDIT: grr, auto-parsing of www links.
[Edited by filecore at 17:42, 7/9/2011] |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118589, posted by PaulV at 22:07, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118585 |
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Posts: 135
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My archive of the site sits at a tad over 160Mb.
Paul |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118590, posted by PaulV at 23:08, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118587 |
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Posts: 135
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Actually the mistake there is your own. He quoted it with an accurate subdomain (archive.retro-kit.co.uk) rather than its www main domain. However, most servers are set up to make www and non-www versions of the principal domain interchangeable; and for those that aren't, it's trivial to add a ReWriteRule to a .htaccess file, or similar. The occasional few actually serve different content for non-www versions, but that's really quite uncommon. I know it's common practice to do this but it actually breaks established DNS naming conventions to serve a site or redirect from a *domain name* to a *host name* which technically, all DNS records that resolve to an IP address are.
To achieve the practice in question, the domain name itself requires an A-record thereby assigning an IP address to the domain effectively turning the domain name into a host name. Although possible, common and catered for by others, it is bad practice and I personally refuse to do it. It is at the end of the day a hack which has sadly taken on a life of its own now because all the major web companies use the technique :-(
That being said, there's nothing technically wrong with adding "www.", "ww.", "w." and even "wwww." *CNAME* records to act as aliases for host names that either don't start with "www." or do but you're catering for people that mis-type stuff. Personally, I try to avoid doing so preferring to keep my DNS records both neat and tidy and adhering to best practice.
Paul |
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Philip Webster |
Message #118591, posted by pwx at 23:32, 7/9/2011, in reply to message #118589 |
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Posts: 227
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My archive of the site sits at a tad over 160Mb.
Paul Mine's 236MB! |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #118593, posted by filecore at 07:29, 8/9/2011, in reply to message #118591 |
Posts: 3867
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My archive of the site sits at a tad over 160Mb.
Paul Mine's 236MB!
Crikey, that's more than double mine. Care to put it up somewhere (preferably somewhere with FTP access) so we can compare and see what's missing from the older copies? |
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Philip Webster |
Message #118597, posted by pwx at 10:42, 8/9/2011, in reply to message #118593 |
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Posts: 227
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My archive of the site sits at a tad over 160Mb.
Paul Mine's 236MB!
Crikey, that's more than double mine. Care to put it up somewhere (preferably somewhere with FTP access) so we can compare and see what's missing from the older copies?
It's a wget -m -np of the acorn.riscos.com site taken when it came back online.
I'll start uploading it now. |
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Paul Vernon |
Message #118598, posted by PaulV at 11:10, 8/9/2011, in reply to message #118597 |
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Posts: 135
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It's a wget -m -np of the acorn.riscos.com site taken when it came back online.
I'll start uploading it now. In that case I suspect it'll have a lot of duplicate html files with different names as it will have followed each and every link for ordering the files using Name, Last Modified, Size and Description.
Spidering the site with a simple wget like that and no filters will result in a *massive* archive as there are 8 combinations of the ordering links and a typical sub directory listing is circa 10KB, that makes for an extra 80KB per sub directory in superfluous files.
[EDIT: added the example calculation for the size of superfluous files]
That's one of the things I went through when I rebuilt the archive from what was available on the net, massive duplication of content and superfluous content created by the various archiving procedures themselves. For instance, the Drobe Archive has unzipped all the Gzip'ed files
I ended up using a custom built spider to do a lot of the de-duplication work for me.
I haven't gone through the entire archive yet but it does seem that my version has the same or more data than the official archive and I've come across one file corruption where my copy is good and the official copy is corrupt but it's only a gif called BIRD in one of the manuals in the 37DiscImage Manuals subfolders.
Examples of differences:
Extra content on my archive.
http://archive.retro-kit.co.uk/acorn.riscos.com/documents/api/
http://acorn.riscos.com/documents/api/
Extra content and non-corrupt images on this page in the manual
http://archive.retro-kit.co.uk/acorn.riscos.com/riscos3/37/37DiscImage/Manuals/Manual/BOOKB/USERGUIDE.HTM
http://acorn.riscos.com/riscos3/37/37DiscImage/Manuals/Manual/BOOKB/USERGUIDE
Paul
[Edited by PaulV at 12:25, 8/9/2011] |
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