Realm polarhome.com will soon close the gate and stop free shell service operation.
Final closing date is not settled yet.

Reason/explanation.

Two years ago I had a dream to create a free, non-commercial and open association, that could provide educative and practical resources to Microsoft infected Internet generation. I want to give my users a chance, to try and learn some other, shell enabled systems, that could operate more stable on higher security level then other OS'es. Users would have a possibility to feel and compare the differences, to be able to make better professional decisions in future, improving the Internet quality in general.

As a grown up person, working almost 10 years in the branch, I did it. My dream came thorough.
About 10.000 users on 3 servers. Linux, OpenVMS, FreeBSD at your service.
More than 2 million hits on the web page per month. Lot of satisfied users with personal home pages, MySQL accounts, running irc bots, compilers, read documentation etc. all for FREE.

After one year operation, I found that it was not good what I did. The reality was far bellow of the expectations.

• New Internet generation does not have respect for FREE services
• OS providers as SUN, HP, Compaq, Be, QNX, RedHat etc. do not give any support for such effort.
• I failed to make "the community" that can breath together and keep independence.
  

From other side abuse is the only word that can describe what users did:

• 90% of users use just irc services and run bots
• 30% of users can not do anything else but upload some root-kit and run some floods and scans against remote hosts
• some users do not know how to edit a file on Unix system, but want to run port scans
• no indications of growing knowledge in the area.
• lack of interest
• most users interpret word FREE as "use as much I can" instead of "as much I need"
• no respect to other users, process consumption, resource sharing, community life etc.

As a result:

• polarhome.com has been banned from almost all irc networks
• ISP sent a warning to close polarhome.com account if it will continue attacks against remote hosts.
• FREE services became just bunch of restricted operations that are impossible to abuse
• Endless page of banned networks/domain together with desperate innocent users try to understand what happened
• … and I'm on the good way to destroy my family life because of overtime that I have put in support and development
  

...just for a dream, that maybe just few of you, from my generation can understand.

Maybe half of the usernames have some kind of killer, death, dark, black attributes. What soul this generation has? Where are the white angels, the brave ones? I made my servers for them... I want to co-operate with those guys and I do not give any support for decadence, malicious activity and personal disaster. There is no excuse for under-education and ignorance.  There is just one from 1000 that could measure up, but for them the system was overloaded with "idle" processes.

This is selfish and decadent generation that does not deserve to have such a service. At least not from me.

To be honest, I am shame what I did.
I ask all positive attitude user's apologies.

Z the root
Wed Oct 3 22:44:47 CEST 2001

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