The dream that became a nightmare, this is how best to describe the story about PublicWare on an internal server.

On February 21, 2004 an old PublicWare dream came true. This was the day where the PublicWare website were moved to an internal server. The change that looked promising for the future was unfortunately disrupted the night between July 8th and 9th. On this night the server disappeared from it’s usual location. A number of computers were stolen at a burglary and among these was the PublicWare server. This closed the website and the email system. With the server disappeared a large amount of PublicWare data, everything from email archive and web statistics to source code disappeared.

Since the burglary there have been worked hard to recreate data from backups and to find a temporary server. That the burglary happened close to a weekend has done that the restore process unfortunately has been delayed so that PublicWare first was back online again July 12 about ten o’clock Danish local time. To begin with not in an updated version, but beside the download counter the website is now recreated to the same level as before the brake in.

Status after the burglary is that PublicWare was unwillingly closed for 3,5 days, and that some data was lost, among this a small amount of source code, because of bad backup practice. The backup practice was focused on hardware failures. It worked by storing the backup on another computer placed close to the server. That computer was also stolen. External backups therefore had to be used. These are of a much older date, which mean the lose of some data. Lucky circumstances has however meant that a complete website and most of the source code have survived. In the end this is not the big disaster for PublicWare that it could have been.

The consequences of the burglary will though become quite big. In the upcoming months a lot of resources has to be used on getting a new permanent server up and running. This will with no doubt have a negative influence on development work over the summer. The burglary also naturally leads to a reversion of the emergency plans, security procedures and the physical security of the server.

But even with the problems that the break in leaves behind, this will not mean a weakening of PublicWare. Curtain internal conditions and procedures will be changed, but there will still be free software, also from an internal server. So the dream still lives.