[cobalt-security] Status of the Cobalt Mailing Lists

[Craig Bernstein <cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Because the unplanned outage of the Cobalt lists this weekend seems to have 
caused another flurry of "what now?" emails, I guess it is time to address 
this issue for good.

I think that it is time for these lists to go away.  Several reasons for this:

1) RaQ 550, the last Sun Cobalt branded product, reached its End of Life in 
February 2004.  Sun has committed to certain support guidelines as part of our 
EOSL policy, including maintaining the knowledgebase and Support Forums 
located at http://cobalt-forum.sun.com/forum/ for three full years.

2) I have had an ongoing problem with users of the lists demanding that I 
delete or modify their posts in the list archives.  I have been unable to come 
up with an answer to those requests that satisfies the users, me, and the 
maintainers of Sun's Privacy Policy.

3) The system on which the lists are hosted is not getting any younger, and as 
many of you noticed this weekend is not very reliable.  It is probably not 
going to be replaced -- see item #1 above.  Virus and spam traffic into the 
server is also out of control and it would require significant effort to put 
decent filtering in place and then maintain the filters indefinitely.

My plan is to shut the cobalt-users, cobalt-security, and cobalt-developers 
lists down on Friday, May 14.

I am open to suggestions about other ways Sun can continue to support the 
Cobalt user community.  One option already mentioned has been a Sun Cobalt 
area on the BigAdmin systems administration portal located at 
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/.  Mailing lists, unfortunately, are not a feature 
of BigAdmin, but I would like to hear the user community's feedback on the 
portal and will be glad to follow up with that team if there is an interest.

Please feel free to send me any comments or questions.  Thanks...

--
...Craig