Why did I leave dn42?

Well, I ran out of IP addresses, so I submitted a PR to get some more. Keep in mind, even with the increase, I still would’ve had less than a /25 - to be exact, I would’ve had 3/4 of a /25 (a /26 and a /27).

The immediate requirement was for an additional autopeering node, but at the same time as I did that I also wanted to reorganize my IP space and put my VM host (bhs2) in its own /29 so that I could have a single router VM on it instead of needing to run a full BGP stack on every VM that was on dn42. (Since the other 5 nodes are all individual VPSes, they’d remain as /32s, but probably get renumbered to higher in the block.)

Longer-term, I also had (and still have, keep an eye on this space!) plans to offer several more services, like reviving my filesharing host and running a clone of the Wayback Machine (it would’ve been opt-in, don’t worry) for dn42, each of which would have (of course) been hosted in their own VM and thus needed their own IP. (I hadn’t even mentioned most of these to anyone because then I’d actually have pressure to get it done and then it would never get done.)

Then the registry maintainer decided to, arbitrarily and against what the wiki says, require me to provide justification, which frankly, I don’t have time for. This is supposed to be a fun project where I do fun things in my spare time and everybody wins. Not a bunch of busywork for someone who thinks he’s better than everyone else (see below). Not to mention that I still didn’t want to say anything about some of the plans I had (see above).

So at that point I pretty much left it, figured I wouldn’t be able to introduce any new dn42 services (without using a reverse proxy or NAT), and figured I’d decide what to do in a year (since I prepaid most of my nodes for at least that long; one of them is even 3 years). There’d still be some time spent to maintain the servers, of course (updates and bugfixes and things like that), but that was ok - it’s pretty minimal even if I don’t get to have any fun of setting up additional services and using them.

Then, when I updated the wiki to state that you might have to provide justification whenever the registry maintainer randomly decides, said registry maintainer reverted it and dropped this gem in IRC:

perhaps if said mntner isn’t happy with how the registry is being managed their effort would be better spent helping to improve it rather than wasting their own and other people’s time.

Needless to say, the only one wasting anyone’s time is him wasting mine, and the only one not trying to improve dn42 here was him (not surprising considering he’s already announced that he doesn’t want to maintain the registry anymore). It seems to be par for the course with him anyway as he did the same thing to some dummy’s AI the other day. I didn’t even go complain about it, indeed other than fixing the wiki I had already dropped it. However, if he feels that my offering multiple nodes and services to dn42 is a waste of my time, who am I to argue?

Hell, when I made a suggestion for a pretty simple improvement, the response was “dunno if anyone would want that”.

< steering> are there notifications from the repo to irc somewhere? :)
< steering> if not it would be awesome to get a webhook set up for that
< lare> don’t know if one would want to get a notification on IRC everytime something changes in any of the PRs (I had the dn42/registry watched and then got sometimes dozends of e-mails per day (hundert(s) per week) which then in some way was just noise (but in someway a reminder to maybe check the PRs again) )

Yup, lare, that’s correct, it would’ve been a nice reminder to maybe check them if I had a free minute, but that’s ok. Guess I’m no one. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to waste my time anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

<~steering> idk what he thinks i was trying to do?
<*> steering: What were you trying to do? :-)
<~steering> well
<~steering> the times that i pitched in reviewing PRs i was most certainly trying to improve the registry?
the time that i spent working on my autopeering was most certainly trying to improve dn42?
<~steering> the time that i spent working on this very PR so that i could offer autopeering and other things that were merely in the planning stage like reviving my file host was trying to improve dn42?
<~steering> and yes, my wiki edit, if a bit snarky, was also trying to improve dn42 since that seems to be the actual policy
<~steering> so what else would i have been trying to do with those things?
<~steering> (other than wasting my own time, apparently.)
<~steering> (not to mention somewhere in the vicinity of $1000)
<~steering> in short, burble can go fuck himself.
<~steering> its particularly funny because despite already being annoyed about this, i was - like i said earlier - just gonna let me stuff sit there at least until the contracts were up
<~steering> but if it’s all just wasting my time well then…

So that’s that. I’ll figure out something else to do with my nodes rather than wasting my own and other people’s time developing and maintaining these services for fun and for free.