[Tango-L] Tango-L archives (appeal to list members)

[Tango-L and Tango-A Administrator]

"Vince Bagusauskas" <vytis at hotmail.com> says:
> For weeks going to
> http://pythia.uoregon.edu/~llynch/Tango-L/index.html
> has not worked

For those who don't know, this is the site for the Tango-L (and Tango-A) 
archives going back to 1994(!). It was created in 2006 by Lucy Lynch, 
then at University of Oregon, and maintained by her until she left the 
university (and for some time after that as well). It continued to run 
"on its own" after that time ... except when it didn't.

The last time it went down in 2008, I found her contact (thanks to list 
member Nancy Ingle) and it was reactivated (and even posts made while it 
was down were still there).

This time, I tried to contact her about a month ago with the last known 
email address I had, but to no avail.

Here is how some of you may be able to help.

SHORT TERM

1. If anyone has an IT contact at University of Oregon who can check 
what happened, reactivate the web server, or at least provide access to 
the files for them to be moved somewhere else, that would be great.

2. If someone actually knows how to get hold of Lucy Lynch, she may 
still be willing and able to take care of this.


MEDIUM TERM

3. It would be great to continue to have an independent archive based on 
the mhonarc software. There are any number of people on this list who 
have access to the appropriate equipment and knowledge to do the 
install. What is needed is the ability to install mhonarc (see 
http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/doc/install.html) on a web server. It would 
need mhonarc, procmail, namazu and perl (per the aforementioned website) 
but more importantly a way to install and configure the above (a Unix 
shell account with appropriate permissions to run a makefile, setup a 
.procmail file to interface to the archive program, etc.). Those who may 
be in a position to help here will know what all this means ... . I 
could set up DNS for a subdomain of tango-L.com (e.g., 
archive.tango-L.com) to point to it.

My commercial ISP does not offer the above, nor does it seem to be 
something offered commercially anymore in a mainstream way. We're pretty 
much looking at someone in a university engineering/computer science 
department (corporate IT departments don't like such outside access), 
and/or a hobbyist with his or her own Unix web server.

Any takers?


Meanwhile, it's not like the information has all been lost. It can be 
pieced together from the following:

a. archive.org has an archive of Lucy's uregon.com site through May 2008 
-- see 
http://web.archive.org/web/20080508025610/http://pythia.uoregon.edu/~llynch/Tango-L/ 
(the query/search feature won't work, though)

b. mailman.mit.edu has a current archive from April 2006 to the present 
-- see http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/tango-l/ (it's pretty 
rudimentary and considerably less user-friendly than the mhonarc-based 
archives, but it's there ...)

So why do we even need to worry about another archive? The main problem 
(aside from the limited functionality) is just that neither I (nor any 
other list member) has direct control over these archives in case they 
disappear one day (though it is possible to take periodic "snapshots" of 
the above sites). Hence it would still be good to get the mhonarc-based 
uoregon site or its functional equivalent back up and running.


Oh, similar story for Tango-A, though fewer people seem to care about 
its archives.

Regards,

Shahrukh Merchant
Tango-L and Tango-A administrator
tango-L-owner at mit.edu