Maybe you have already noticed it: Some news, pages and downloads are no longer available. This is due to the fact that our previous web server broke down about 3 weeks ago. Since then we have been working to get it back to its original state.

The beginning of spring has not been kind to us, the weather is anything but springlike. It is wet, cold and not cosy at all. Actually, you'd rather want to hide your feet under a warm blanket, but then something really stupid happens. At the beginning of March, our web server - or to be more precise, our hard drive - broke down. And to make matters worse, we also had bad luck. The backups we've made were also on the same disk. Very unfortunate, but it happened. We can't change that now.

A new web server (from a backup of August 2020) was quickly made available, but now we have to restore the missing data from all available sources. Fortunately, the authors still have their pages and what is missing we can reconstruct thanks to the Internet Archives. As we are all working on this in our spare time, it may take a few more days to get back to the old status. Please excuse us!

What have we learned from this? Things that we cannot influence can happen. We have to be better prepared for the future. This means: "No more central backups on the server". Up to now, the backups have been copied to another root server which is located in the same data centre (OVH says hello). Therefore, the backups will soon be copied by team members to local computers and additionally stored in another data centre - geographically separated from each other.

But we also have positive things to report. The new server is much more powerful than the old one. The web pages should now be delivered much faster.