The company providing the hosting of the GNA machines is not asking anything in return. The downside of this gift is that when a serious problem occurs that involves other machines or network equipment, GNA does not have top priority.

Very early september 10 (1am or so) Cedric, a daily user of Savannah, noticed that the network leading to GNA was down. Early in the morning, I called Antoine (our primary contact at Free) and he told me that they were experiencing serious problems with the network equipement. He hoped that the problem would be fixed before the end of the day.

Late in the afternoon Antoine called back and said that, after all, it was unlikely that the problem would be fixed soon. He arranged for Frederic, another Free employee to assist us in moving the machines from their current location to another one, without a need to change the IP addresses.

I called Frederic and we made an appointement for the next morning. He could not assist us immediately because he was already overwhelmed. We made an appointment for saturday morning.

When I called the next morning it turned out that Frederic did no sleep at all, but he was ready to help us move the machines. Henry, another daily GNA user, came along too. It took the three of us about 5 hours to do the work and Frederic helped us during the whole time, driving the car, configuring the switch, debugging connection problems and providing cables when they where missing although he probably had more pressing problems to address.

GNA indeed had a severe 72h downtime. It was a serious inconvenience to me and to all GNA users who depend on it for their day job. I guess some users feared that the machines where hacked or physically damaged. It would be good for GNA to have an "emergency homepage" located somewhere else. Maybe the people who worried most could spare some time to help the GNA team in this direction so that there is a way to post information when everything is down.