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
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