Got some mail today from people that wanted to know what this Ninth Circle Alliance thing is. They go up on the site, see this forum and it is kinda difficult to get access. It’s not really transparent. So they mail me and ask me what’s up. Especially people that used to frequent its previous incarnation. I will explain in this blog post.
The Ninth Circle Alliance was first born to fill the gap that was left by the disbanding of the League of Independent Satanists. It had lofty goals. It wanted to unite everyone together again, without being an organisation. It was an open effort, accessible by all. It went well for a while, but then came the dreaded disk crash that cost me a lot of data. Since then I have been thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with the Ninth Circle Alliance. And this is what I came up with.
Being open for everyone doesn’t work anymore. Especially since many Left Hand Path-followers don’t like to be in the public. So the Ninth Circle Alliance will be a private group of people with similar interests and various skills. The thing you will see publicly is what the Alliance will produce (blogs, columns, websites, art galleries or whatever its contributors care to kick out into this world). There is some strict screening in place before someone will get access. You will be considered worthy if it’s members deem you worthy.
I think it will work better this way. This way there will be a more dedicated group of people that can stay hidden if they want to, and yet they can enrich themselves by interacting with likeminded people. The exclusivity will (hopefully) make the Ninth Circle Alliance more valuable.
So, Richard came by yesterday evening to drop the server off (thanks dude). It’s an IBM eServer 336 8873, with one 3.6 Ghz Xeon, 4 GB of RAM and 2×72 GB disks. Nice box. It’s kinda noisy though. So I was sitting in the noise later to install Solaris 10 on the thing, which runs beautifully on it by the way. But the noise is bugging me. So, if anyone knows of a nice solution to quiet that thing down a notch (or two), I’m open for suggestions. Preferably without impairing the machine by too much. 
Props to Richard. Really, he has some 1u server that he doesn’t use anymore, and I can have it. It’s some dual cpu Xeon box with some disk and mem, and it will do fine as an app/web/mail box. I guess I owe him a favor. So, I now need to find a nice secluded space for it (because the machine can be a bit noisy)
