[Imc-communication] [IMC-Tech] images.indymedia

[Micah Anderson]

images.indymedia.org is something from long long long long long ago that still 
exists. There is significant IMC history on this machine, and people
need to know about this. Its very important and I am afraid it will be
lost.

First and foremost, it is *not backed up*. When Troy wrote in January of this 
year[1] with usage statistics (its over 200gb of data) he said two things: 
1. capacity will not be growing, 2. the data is not backed up. 
At this time, I was advocating people push for creating a large IMC
backup archive to preserve this data and people are going to have to
find a solution to this problem when the disk fills up. Toya created
this page[2] on the wiki about this project.

Ages ago when indymedia first started we had a sympathetic friend who
worked at Loudeye, Troy Davis (troy at nack.net). For the WTO protests he 
setup a server on incredible bandwidth to serve rich-media content 
(movies, audio, etc.) and when people uploaded this content to IMC sites, 
this media was sent to this server and the URLs re-written in Active and
then the files removed from the IMC server. We didn't have the disk
space or bandwidth to serve these files, and so everything was sent 
to centerstage.loudeye.com (this was where images.indymedia.org was pointing 
to).

Pretty much *every* indymedia site used this service. In fact its listed
in the Active Install notes in section 3.5.3[3]. Originally there
was one account ('imc') and it was over FTP and I still remember the
password. When all the IMC sites (with a few exceptions) were all
located on stallman there was a cronjob that handled this for everyone:

*/10 * * * * root /usr/local/sbin/pushtoeye.pl > /dev/null 2>&1

We encouraged www-features to use this service, instead of linking to
images remotely[4].

After a while Troy left Loudeye, but he took the machine with
all the great historical content and hooked it up at home on just as
fast bandwidth and has kept it available for everyone to use. Its been
known as stream.paranode.com for a long time. The most recent email from
Troy about this server was in June about illegal content from some sites
that needed to be deleted[5]

There were a lot of programs written to manage this content, pushtoeye
was the one used for the longest time. Toni wrote 'multiplacer' at one
point, announced in 2000[6].

In January 2003 there was an IMC-tech meeting[7] where JB talked about
cleaning up Loudeye content and removing duplicates because of space
problems. He had determined that at that time there was 227,479 *unique*
rich-media files on loudeye from all the various IMC sites. There was
about 500,000 files in total, but many duplicates. This was in 2003 and
this content has not been backed up for *years*, and many IMC sites still 
use this service (take for example chiapas[8]. In 2001 Troy posted some 
statistics[9] about usage, over 100k hits a day with peak usage of more 
than 25 hits per second.

1. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-tech/2007-January/0105-ue.html
2. http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/ImcArchives
3. http://www.active.org.au/doc/active/install.html
4. http://archives.lists.indymedia.org/www-features/2001-March/000255.html
5. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-tech/2007-June/0604-6j.html
6. http://archives.lists.indymedia.org/imc-summaries/2002-May/000038.html
7. http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/MeetingLog3Jan2003
8. http://images.indymedia.org/imc/chiapas/
9. http://archives.lists.indymedia.org/imc-tech/2001-July/004691.html

* toya <toya at riseup.net> [070926 15:13]:
> hi,
> i had no idea it existed...i dont know if anyone in brasil knows about
> it and has access to it....
> i tried to open the link but didnt show anything....
> what is it?
> what is for?
> thanks
> toya
> 
> 
> Em Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 11:32:58AM -0400, Micah Anderson escreveu:
> > * Bradley Stuart <bradley at riseup.net> [070924 17:14]:
> > > dc-imc volunteers had trouble removing the file from  
> > > images.indymedia.org
> > > 
> > > When SC-IMC was using dadaIMC software and images.indymedia.org to  
> > > host files, I never knew how to remove files from the  
> > > images.indymedia.org server.
> > 
> > I believe that each IMC had their own login/password generated to upload
> > to images.indymedia.org and that login/password would be in a script
> > somewhere that did the upload. Using those credentials, the files could
> > also be deleted.
> > 
> > The management of images.indymedia.org is done by troy at nack.net, and
> > sadly this is a poorly used service now by IMCs. It is not backed up and
> > some IMCs use it, some dont know it exists...
> > 
> > micah
> > _______________________________________________
> > imc-tech mailing list
> > imc-tech at lists.indymedia.org
> > http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-tech
> 
> -- 
> .....