Dear Community!
It is with rather a nervous hand I type this new thread but after months of to and fro, working with contributions and suggestions from the forum, we wish to share the Fall Rollout plan. This forms a significant service enhancement for IRIXNet and the larger SGI/Enthusiast community as a whole. Central to the idea was always to create a 'conference' vibe with a lounge space. Raion, Kaigan and others have long supported the view that serious enthusiasts seek professional spaces to discuss new ideas. As an extension from the lounge there was a clear requirement for additional products and services to help this willing to put effort in to creating new content. So let's go there:
i) Messaging : sharing is everything, especially for teams. The chosen platform for the IM is Mattermost. Various platforms were chosen during the proof of concept phase and Mattermost ticked all the boxes. The Mattermost product is self-hosted on our equipment, in our datacenter racks.
2) Connectivity : Development of software, sharing data and describing products often needs party interaction. To that end we've developed a secure VPN service hosted in our own datacenter space and using our own in-house hardware and licensed platform(s). There is no outsourcing. We deliberately chose to stay away from public cloud to maintain independence, control and security of our data and features. Users of the service can choose from a number of designs including a typical private/NAT product like you'd see from Nord or any other VPN provider. The top tier will receive a reserved STATIC PUBLIC and UNSHARED IPv4 address in the subscription allowing for true 1:1 routed reachability to their end point from the public internet. All nodes irrespective of public or private addressing will be fully routed and should allow for some excellent LAN parties!
3) Hosting : We figured a lot of us will have a 'homepage' or some other sort of hosting product. Maybe you're already paying a few dollars for it. With our datacenter provision we figured it was a simple step to offer IN hosting as a product in the subscription. Raion was also very keen to see that HTML creativity allowed for function with legacy browsers (something he continues to drive for in the existing sites and services). So will rollout not only a contemporary web hosting service using new hardware but we'll go one further and allow for users to have a real piece of history in their own WebFORCE account.
4) Hardware : Not everyone has access to SGI hardware 24/7, some even not at all. I certainly know of a number of friends who miss the old days and don't have the time or money to spend setting up a retrobattlestation. Development and learning is one of the main focusses of each and all of us. So we've hosted some SGI hardware in our rack and we're giving shell amounts to subscribers.
Here is a little infographic we put together to show what we've put together. Hopefully it hits the right spot. By the way, this is not vaporware, this is real. We're ready when you are, bring on the fun!
Finally, allow me to say thank you to the community for allowing me to participate in this project and exercise. I truly hope it brings value to you and to the enthusiast community at large. I would encourage any of you to ask questions about the content of the delivery to this thread and the relevant person will hopefully have an answer for you.
Hope you all have a great weekend.
Rich
EDIT: some typos.
EDIT2: I forgot to mention this is not vaporware.
