Astaro.org

I am not going to beat this dead horse any more and move on. Most of my interactions on astaro.org were with other beta testers/devs/mods. Astaro long time ago set up a tradition of sharing everything. The devs shared inside knowledge including command line hacks to enable stuff that was crippled or disabled for one reason or another. Other linux users offered neat tricks that were only available because someone had a special need and they tinkered with configurations under the hood. All the moderators were always pleasant, helpful and polite. Even bending backward sometimes to admit their mistakes. Fascinatingly, most of them were doing this for free and donated their own time for helping others. This is what has been lost forever. No amount of community developers and other company employees can offer this level of support and understanding as it takes years to develop the skills and relations to nurture and sustain a community the size of astaro.

AlanT said:

Perhaps it would have been harmless to leave the site up, but there was simply too much uncertainty, and given the age of the code we were on, and the inability to upgrade to a newer version, it would be irresponsible to leave the site up based on a maybe. You can argue the decision if you like, but it's Sophos who bears the biggest risk of being wrong.

I don't understand why the site wasn't left as read only or better why there are no up2date copies of that website for research purposes hosted at sophos on this new system.  I understand that the final stain would have been on sophos' shirt if the site had got hacked but you have to understand that there was years and years worth of hidden code on that website that will never be replaced. The worst part is that all the google links will soon be lost too once the caches start to expire. I guess its time to move on to copernicus.

BAlfson said:

Sherwin, there is no defending the indefensible. The discussions of closing "our" BB did not include one, not one, of the moderators. If Sophos doesn't understand that that alone was incredibly disrespectful of all of the participants, I just don't think I can explain it to them.

You have nothing to explain to anyone Bob. This was a final blow to completely sever ties with astaro. Its been in the making for a while, the timing and methodology was a little amateurish. You have always been nice and understanding and the most helpful mod along with Scott. Someone at sophos decided to do this whether be the IT team or management. However I do feel that sophos has had a lot of time to move the site over but haven't for some reason. I have better backups than this at home that can bring about 12 vms from a total disaster to up within a few hours. I thought they were going to set this new site up, move all the astaro content over and then make the other site read only. I don't think the read only part was ever considered. Why don't we at-least have a read only version of site backed up here already is really telling.

Sure Win 2 said:

Billybob The feedback has had actions for the general community. You can see Ruckus showcasing some of those changes in the General Forums. I see you requested to remove liking of their own posts. Something that I can look into and I am guilty of this...sometimes I really like what I wrote. But really I don't see the harm in it to leave it for now.

I was joking about the feedback as I really don't see the point. We already disagree on like buttons. See... We are not on facebook. We are discussing security of an enterprise where more than likely facebook is already blocked for most regular users. So like buttons although nice to say thanks in a hurry to others, serve no purpose if you are trying to pat your own back and have narcissistic tendencies ;-)

Its was a pleasure knowing everyone that taught me something new everyday at astaro.org. I will be around for further betas etc. But for now RIP ASTARO.ORG. 

I am not going to beat this dead horse any more and move on. Most of my interactions on astaro.org were with other beta testers/devs/mods. Astaro long time ago set up a tradition of sharing everything. The devs shared inside knowledge including command line hacks to enable stuff that was crippled or disabled for one reason or another. Other linux users offered neat tricks that were only available because someone had a special need and they tinkered with configurations under the hood. All the moderators were always pleasant, helpful and polite. Even bending backward sometimes to admit their mistakes. Fascinatingly, most of them were doing this for free and donated their own time for helping others. This is what has been lost forever. No amount of community developers and other company employees can offer this level of support and understanding as it takes years to develop the skills and relations to nurture and sustain a community the size of astaro.

AlanT said:

Perhaps it would have been harmless to leave the site up, but there was simply too much uncertainty, and given the age of the code we were on, and the inability to upgrade to a newer version, it would be irresponsible to leave the site up based on a maybe. You can argue the decision if you like, but it's Sophos who bears the biggest risk of being wrong.

I don't understand why the site wasn't left as read only or better why there are no up2date copies of that website for research purposes hosted at sophos on this new system.  I understand that the final stain would have been on sophos' shirt if the site had got hacked but you have to understand that there was years and years worth of hidden code on that website that will never be replaced. The worst part is that all the google links will soon be lost too once the caches start to expire. I guess its time to move on to copernicus.

BAlfson said:

Sherwin, there is no defending the indefensible. The discussions of closing "our" BB did not include one, not one, of the moderators. If Sophos doesn't understand that that alone was incredibly disrespectful of all of the participants, I just don't think I can explain it to them.

You have nothing to explain to anyone Bob. This was a final blow to completely sever ties with astaro. Its been in the making for a while, the timing and methodology was a little amateurish. You have always been nice and understanding and the most helpful mod along with Scott. Someone at sophos decided to do this whether be the IT team or management. However I do feel that sophos has had a lot of time to move the site over but haven't for some reason. I have better backups than this at home that can bring about 12 vms from a total disaster to up within a few hours. I thought they were going to set this new site up, move all the astaro content over and then make the other site read only. I don't think the read only part was ever considered. Why don't we at-least have a read only version of site backed up here already is really telling.

Sure Win 2 said:

Billybob The feedback has had actions for the general community. You can see Ruckus showcasing some of those changes in the General Forums. I see you requested to remove liking of their own posts. Something that I can look into and I am guilty of this...sometimes I really like what I wrote. But really I don't see the harm in it to leave it for now.

I was joking about the feedback as I really don't see the point. We already disagree on like buttons. See... We are not on facebook. We are discussing security of an enterprise where more than likely facebook is already blocked for most regular users. So like buttons although nice to say thanks in a hurry to others, serve no purpose if you are trying to pat your own back and have narcissistic tendencies ;-)

Its was a pleasure knowing everyone that taught me something new everyday at astaro.org. I will be around for further betas etc. But for now RIP ASTARO.ORG.