Welcome to Igloo Cafe!

Igloo Cafe is a tiny retro-Internet and retro-gaming community project, inspired on the ideals of the old Internet ambience and on services people stopped offering. Originally started in September 2020 as an experimental server for hosting tiny personal homepages for some friends, today seeks to be a place to make projects and services based on our main purpose and to continue being a small community of people.

Members here can create and modify their homepages (called here as "personal igloos"), share images in our gallery, while any of our visitors can participate in our message board or having fun in some of our classic multiplayer gameservers. We also have a variety of other misc websites, services and random weird projects that you can find at the middle of the sidebar.

The design of this website is highly inspired on VectorStar Networks, an old free shell account provider created sometime in 1995 that sadly closed in 2007.

If you are visiting this website from an older computer/browser that doesn't have support for modern CSS, please check our minimal version of this website written in HTML4 (works nice on RetroZilla) or better yet, our gopherhole.

Latest news

The E-mail is back

Posted by ~geckof on November 07, 2024 @ 15:06 PM

Finally, after so many attempts, I have been able to install a working Postfix email server here, with DMARC and DKIM configured.

It's also already configured to receive emails for password recoveries and account activations on some of our services, so if you no longer remember for example your BBS password you can restore it now without problems.

Some mail providers may detect our messages as "spam". Ignore them and if possible mark them as legitimate mail.

Thanks for reading!

Users igloos maintenance

Posted by ~geckof on October 07, 2024 @ 04:00 AM

Due to optimization reasons, I have been switching the installed distro on my Raspberry Pi to Void Linux, which seems to go a thousand times faster than with standard Raspbian. Because of this, many of the dependent services such as user igloos and the IcculusFinger will be offline until we can restore everything to how it was before.

UPDATE 2024-10-08 14:46 UTC: Cloudflare tunnels and Nginx are now installed after some time. Now I need to restore back the igloos, the external Gopher server and the IcculusFinger. Installing services on runit is very weird but pretty simple at the same time.

UPDATE 2024-10-08 16:47 UTC: Bad news, turns out the SD card finally died while I was restarting the Pi after installing some packages. The Pi was no longer reconnecting to the Internet until I decided to reformat it (as I thought I had done something wrong) and started getting write errors, which made me confirm that unfortunately the SD I was using finally died after using it for only 4 months. Unfortunately it was the only SD I had in my house as I haven't used it again until I got my RPi, so due to this the maintenance will be stretched out to a few more days, sorry.

UPDATE 2024-10-11 07:40 UTC: Writing something here for not leaving this dead. I ended up buying a new SanDisk MicroSD and have been able to reinstall the whole operating system as it was before (Nginx OK, Cloudflare Tunnels OK, PHP-FPM OK). I just need to start mounting user directories, adjusting the SFTP server and installing quotas.

UPDATE 2024-10-15 04:32 UTC: I'm having some troubles while setting SFTP users chroots. For some reason even if "ChrootDirectory" is specified on the SSHd config people can still access to the whole system directories and I don't like that. I tried everything like I used to do on Debian but seems like it does nothing on Void Linux, yikes... Well, I found another SFTP server fortunately on the Void Linux packages called "SFTPGo", I will try it and see how it goes.

UPDATE 2024-10-15 18:38 UTC: Finally after such a long time, personal igloos are back! That's all so far, I still need to reactivate the Gopher and IcculusFinger.

UPDATE 2024-10-28 01:12 UTC: Wow, it's been too many weeks since I tried to reinstall IcculusFinger. Bad news, apparently after a power outage at my house a few hours ago, the RPi didn't want to boot again. No, it's not a problem with the SD because it could write correctly, apparently the boot partition must have been broken with the power cut and that's why it didn't boot again. Since I don't want to spend more time fixing things, I decided to drop the distro from Void to Debian again. I hope to be able to restore everything back to the way it was before.

UPDATE 2024-10-28 18:48 UTC: Well, finally after so long the personal igloos and the IcculusFinger has returned. By the way, because we have changed our SFTP server to SFTPGo instead of vanilla OpenSSH, it's now possible to access your member account from the browser from sftpgo.igloocafe.xyz (PM me to request a password). Direct SFTP access will still be via SSH private keys. Sorry for making this too long, I've been very busy with other things and lack of interest.

Igloo Cafe turns 4! (+ new updates)

Posted by ~geckof on September 20, 2024 @ 14:43 PM

On a day on September 18, 2020, the first VPS of the Igloo Cafe "retro-Internet community project" would be started for the first time, on a pretty small Contabo VPS. From being a place where personal homepages were offered for a small group of friends, it has become something more than just that. In fact, I started it after seeing interest in what the Tildeverse was all about, wanting to have my own space on Gopher, "alternative" tilde-like communities like Park-City.club (which I don't know if that's still alive anymore) and those free shell account providers like SDF.

Today, in these 4 years of this project, I would like to thank all those who played and enjoyed our Igloo Arena gameservers and helped our projects and services with ideas and other resources.

Unfortunately I haven't had enough motivation or time to finish with most of the things I've been doing to announce it in a different post, but taking advantage of these anniversary days, I'll leave all the changes and new things I've been doing here:
- The new Igloo Cafe Gallery! (resurrection of something I had done around 2021, inspired by the SDF's photo gallery).
- The Igloo Cafe Help Pages, which replaces our old wiki which I opted to close due to complications. It's running with Ubergeek's/Thunix's Wiki.php (as the original wiki used to run in early 2023 before PmWiki) but with some improvements and with a minimalistic design.
- A recent move from our main VPS to DataWagon, with 4vCPU and 8GB of RAM! And yes, we're back in NY.
- Finger! Yeah, that's right, that old and forgotten protocol to get information about an user on a UNIX-like server. It's running with IcculusFinger and all existing Igloo Cafe members will be able to post content on it by editing the ".plan" file in a new directory called "public_finger". To see your current Finger status, do in your terminal "finger yourusername@igl01.igloocafe.xyz" or you can also use our IcculusFinger web interface at "http(s)://finger.igloocafe.xyz/?user=yourusername". Installing this was very complicated but finally it was possible with a bit of patience.
- The igloos have been moved to my new Raspberry Pi 3B+ that I bought at the beginning of August (to avoid problems).
- User igloos avatars are now loaded and processed from a Bash script running every 1 hour with the help of a cronjob, which avoids the loads by preprocessing the images directly from PHP.
- And other things I no longer remember now...
Thanks for everything and happy anniversary!!! :)

Closure of the Igloo Cafe Wiki

Posted by ~geckof on August 30, 2024 @ 12:15 PM

As some of you may have known (even if I have not made any announcement), the Igloo Cafe Wiki was finally re-hosted with the MediaWiki software, which allowed users to easily manage their accounts, among other features.

Because the wiki never received contributions from other users (which I don't force them to do obviously) and because I feel that running something like MediaWiki in this space is too overwhelming with the amount of features it has for only me to use, I have opted to finally close the wiki.

All important articles will be moved to a new website called "Igloo Cafe Help Pages", where I will be editing the articles myself (and without user contributions). It will once again use the "Wiki.php" script from Ubergeek/Thunix because of how simple it is and also so that older browsers can read the pages without HTML distortions.

And no, this is not the "big annoucement" I wanted to post either, there are still a lot of things to finish, sorry.

Server host migration

Posted by ~geckof on July 07, 2024 @ 02:15 AM

A host migration from Sparked to a new VPS located in Pennsylvania will take place in a few hours, keeping almost the same hardware features. All services running during this period of time (as well as this website) will temporarily stop working until the migration has been successfully completed.

More information about this update in a few hours.

Want to see more? Check the Newsletter on the Igloo Cafe BBS.
Old hand-written HTML news are now archived and can be found here.