This posts consists of two parts, both of which are related to Circumlunar Space but are otherwise basically entirely separate.
All the way back in 2018, before the war, before COVID, before Gemini, before ROOPHLOCH, before...okay, actually, no, not before I built the Franken-Peugeot like I thought it might have been, and not before I wrote VF-1 either, but nevertheless quite a very long time ago, I made a phlog post entitled 'Hostname pedantry, or "GNU/Circumlunar"' (this was also before RMS's fall from...well, nobody could really say "grace", but...anyway). Therein I explained that even though the hostnames circumlunar.space and zaibatsu.circumlunar.space both resolved to the same IP address, and even though any Gopher content available using one name in the URL could also be fetched at the equivalent URL using the other name (Gopher having no protocol-level support for anything other than this), they were nevertheless logically separate entities and you were "supposed to" use zaibatsu.circumlunar.space for Zaibatsu specific stuff (e.g. phlog posts by anybody with an account at the Zaibatsu) and circumlunar.space strictly for "CS in general" stuff (e.g. for the Circumlunar FAQ). But I said that it wasn't a big deal and, in particular, I said that "the naked domain circumlunar.space will continue to point to the Zaibatsu, forever", because I didn't want to break any links or scripts.
My 2018-11-30 phlog post 'Hostname pedantry, or "GNU/Circumlunar"'
Well, I'm breaking that promise after nearly six years. Some time in early August the Zaibatsu will be moved to a new IP address (specifically to the one currently assigned to gemini.circumlunar.space), but the circumlunar.space name will continue to point to the same old address we've had ever since March of 2018.
Now, I still really don't want to break any old links scattered throughout the phlogosophere, so anything published by Zaibatsu sundogs prior to the time of the great splitting will continue to be accessible under circumlunar.space, as always. But people who have e.g. old Moku Pona configurations which were setup in those old distant days might stop seeing updates to phlogs which are actually still active. And other minor weirdness might happen too, e.g. Zaibatsu old timers may have written phlog posts early in 2018 which included footnote URLs back to previous posts of theirs using the circumlunar.space name, even though most people reading those posts today arrive at them under the zaibatsu.circumlunar.space name.
None of this is really catastrophic but nevertheless I want to call on Zaibatsu sundogs who were around in 2018 and also on folks in Gopherspace more broadly to please consider doing a tiny bit of maintenance to help smooth over this awkward transition. If you have a Gopherhole (no matter where it's hosted) which has ever linked to anything at *.circumlunar.space (a quick grep ought to tell you whether it has or not), then please consider updating those links if necessary to bring them in line with the following guidelines:
If you operate any kind of Gopher content aggregator, whether it's your own personal Moku Pona setup or a public resource like Bongusta!, please check for phlogs which are configured with circumlunar.space URLs and change them to zaibatsu.circumlunar.space instead. This should not trigger any "phantom updates" in change detection systems, so don't be afraid of that.
If you have an account at the Zaibatsu and you have a .ssh/config file or an rsync script or a git repo remote address or anything like that which uses circumlunar.space, please change it to zaibatsu.circumlunar.space to ensure it continues to work after the change. Once the Zaibatsu moves to its new address, there will be no personal accounts on circumlunar.space to log into.
The world will not end if nobody does any of this, but it will be just a tiny bit neater if at least some people do, so please consider it. I know it's kind of tedious. I know *I'm* being kind of tedious. Thank you for your patience.
Zaibatsu sundog tfurrows ran a quirky and novel anonymous Gopherspace service under the named Red Consensus (consensus.circumlunar.space), which functioned by means of a custom shell program (written in Commodore BASIC!) which was launched when you SSHed in with a username that required no password. This was one of the very first "Circumlunar Outposts", personal projects run by sundogs which offer additional services (but fall short of offering shell access) to the circumlunar community or the public. It was launched, I believe, in October of 2018.
The Red Consensus lived on a Raspberry Pi in tfurrows' home behind his ordinary internet connection, and sadly he has informed me that, without warning, his ISP is now blocking incoming connections on the relevant port which means the Consensus is no longer accessible from the outside world and therefore, for all intents and purposes, has ceased to exist. This is a real shame, but probably does not come as a huge surprise to many. The slow but steady decline of the ability to host your own internet services at home has been widely lamented in the relevant circles for a great many years, and I don't think anybody expects the situation to get better any time soon, or frankly, ever. That whole concept is now a historical footnote from the freewheeling early days of the internet, before it was captured, appliancised, gentrified, whatever.
Anyway, this point of this section of this post is not to mope over the state of the internet, it's to say thank you to tfurrows for taking the effort to make Gopherspace a little more interesting. And, while I'm at it, thank you also to yargo who continues to run Ryumin's Dome (dome.circumlunar.space), our git provider and now certainly the oldest Circumlunar Outpost (perhaps it always was, I forget which came first), and to visiblink who runs our XMPP server and previously also ran our webserver in the days before any of the colonies offered webspace.