Remember Geocities? That online community with free hosting that so many people (including myself) started our first website on.

Did you know that PCMech.com got its start on Geocities? Back before I even owned the domain, the concept behind this site was run on GeoCities. At SiliconValley/Lakes/3553/, to be exact.

Well, Yahoo bought Geocities. It went nowhere. And, they just recently pulled the plug. Adios to a little piece of 90’s Internet history.

While most people look at it kind of like the demolition of a dusty old Vegas casino, some people don’t take it sitting down. One man set out to save it. In six days.

Say hello to Reocities. A private vendetta to recover and restore as much of Geocities as possible prior to the October 26th shutdown. It started with SiliconValley, but then expanded into other neighborhoods. They managed to get a fairly expansive segment of the community.

You can read about how they did it, but here is a small segment of it:

At this point in time there are only 44 hours to go until it is permanently curtains for GeoCities. We’re talking Friday to Saturday night, and I realize that if I don’t do something drastic, then this effort is going to fail.

So, enter the secret weapon. A couple of years ago I wrote a small (about 1 billion pages) search engine. For that purpose I bought a cluster of 5 machines, which have since been upgraded with 4 TB storage each, and already had a fairly beefy CPU. They’re also connected to the net with some good uplinks and have a 1Gb/s connection between them to a dedicated switch. Time to get those guys involved.

Now that we know the structure of GeoCities, it is possible to farm out the fetching of pieces to each of the cluster nodes. A small program figures out who is busy with what, and each cluster can concentrate on one of the 721 shelves, and the 10 000 possible accounts on that shelf. In the past 4 days some of those shelves have already seen extensive coverage, so we mark those as done, leaving about half to be processed still. After a few more hours to get this all set up the cluster was humming along at 150 Mb/s inbound. That’s a CD every 30 seconds or so!

Impressive effort. I’m sure anybody who was still (stupidly) depending on Geocities will be very happy with these efforts.

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