[opm-announce] opm.blitzed.org has shut down

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

As many of you have surmised, our main database and list server has
been out of action now for over a week.  We have completely failed
to get in touch with our contact at the hosting company and don't
really want to escalate things there given the free nature of the
hosting.

We have partial backups of the machine which is why David has been
able to bring back the mail service on another host, but some of the
database tables used to run the DNSBL were massive (millions of
rows) and we never did find a way to affordably remotely mirror
them.  Reconstruction of the DNSBL service would therefore not be
trivial even if we had access to a similar host today.

Also we must consider that those of us who work on developing the
DNSBL software and those doing the day to day administrative duties
(mostly responding to abuse reports for our proxy testing) have a
lot less spare time than we did when we started the project.

Finally, in the time since we started, other proxy / compromised
host DNSBLs commonly used by email administrators, such as SORBS,
NJABL and CBL have grown much faster and the overlap between OPM and
these was significant.  For mail administrators, OPM has therefore
been growing less and less relevant.

As a result of all of this, we feel it would be best at this point
to shut down the DNSBL.  We will shortly be arranging for the zones
to be emptied of all records and you should disable lookups against
opm.blitzed.org at your earliest convenience.

We apologise for the chaotic nature of this shut down, and for being
so reliant on one server in the first place; unfortunately there was
simply no budget anywhere to get additional servers so additional
redundancy was always put in the "would be nice one day.." category.

OPM did remain very useful for some because of the aggressive way we
sought to remove dynamic IPs -- not a concern for mail admins but
very relevant to others such as IRC admins and possibly some web
sites.  For these all we can say is that we hope to take the next 3
to 6 months to see what resources we can pull together and how much
time we can devote in order to bring the service back in a more
redundant form.

Thank you to all those who supported the operation of the DNSBL for
so long.

Regards,
Andy Smith
Blitzed OPM
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