On Wednesday, October 16th at 2:43AM EDT, the T1 to the FSF's main offices went down. We soon learned that the basement of our office building had flooded. The outage was neither the fault of our equipment, nor our T1 service provider, but rather due to the heavy rain. The flood destroyed all of Verizon's equipment in the basement, leaving everyone in our building with a T1 connection without service. After much wrangling of various divisions of Verizon on our part, Verizon finally restored service on Friday, October 18th, at 11:57AM EDT. The GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation were without email service for over 48 hours. We apologize for Verizon's outage. Most of our discussions here at the FSF while we couldn't read email were about how we might prevent this situation from happening again. Unfortunately, despite lots of brain-storming, it seems we do not yet have the resources to prevent this type of outage. We are asking for your help to keep the FSF's and GNU Project's services up and running 24/7. We've identified three main areas where we need volunteer and donation support to make this happen. (0) We are in need of good rack-mountable machines. We have a good colocation facility in the Boston area that donates bandwidth and rackspace for the FSF and the GNU Project; however, we are only able to put rack-mountable hardware there. With a redundant mail server setup there, it would have been possible to continue delivery of mail even with the T1 to our main offices down. Currently we only have three donated rack-mountable machines. They handle savannah.gnu.org, www.gnu.org, and ftp.gnu.org, respectively. Thus, mail.gnu.org is a tower case that lives on the "wrong" side of our T1. (1) We are in need of volunteers to donate their time to work on a mail system setup that can scale across multiple machines, hopefully throughout the world. With the help of a few volunteers (thanks to Ward Vandewege in particular), we implemented an anti-spam system using a combination of SpamAssassin and TMDA to reduce the amount of spam sent to GNU mailing lists and tag possible spam sent to individual FSF and GNU email addresses. We need expertise and volunteer time to build an infrastructure using Free Software that can scale the current setup to make use of multiple servers. We've had an initial offer from Loic Dachary and his team in France to assist, but we will need a large team. In the end, what we'll have is an integration of existing useful Free Software that ISPs can use for redundant anti-spam ideas. We have a savannah project called "monty-python" to work on this idea. Please join it if you would like to help and introduce yourself on its mailing list, "spam-discuss". Information on subscribing to the mailing list can be found at (2) We are in need of redundant Internet connections to our main office. During the outage, only the T1s in the office building were down. If we'd had a backup connection to the Internet using a different technology, such as an SDSL connection, our mail server almost certainly would have continued to function without interruption. The FSF currently does not have enough funds to pay for a redundant connection to our offices; even the T1 services we have now are donated. If you are able to donate rack-mountable hardware, colocation space, sysadmin/postmaster volunteering time, or additional connectivity for our main offices, please contact Ravi Khanna at the FSF via . FSF is the primary provider of infrastructure for the GNU Project. We have only one system person on staff, and our volunteer ranks are sadly dwindling, not growing. We desperately need donations to continue providing uninterrupted Internet services for the Free Software Community. Paul Fisher Senior System Administrator, Free Software Foundation