Some Background

The current methods we use to share Divine Truth teachings include live events, our website, our synchronization servers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and videos via YouTube. To enable this sharing, we store all publicly accessible data on servers in Australia, Canada, and the USA, but only the Canadian servers currently allow public connections. The USA servers are used in the important role as a portal or an intermediate store to send and receive data securely between Australia and the rest of the world.

Some History

For nearly 5 years Gene (Eugene) Mindel in the USA has been assisting us by hosting 2 x rackmount dual CPU, 256GB RAM, 10G network, 48TB ZFS RaidZ2 servers 24×7 in his home, along with a permanent 1gbit/sec link to the internet.

Due to the large video file sizes of our Divine Truth video files, we cannot send them or upload them via the internet in Australia. Even our recently installed Starlink, our only unlimited internet connection, averages 10mbit/sec upload, and it fails completely at least 4 times per day. Jesus has examined all of the possible ways to improve this connection, and all of them we are currently unable to do (more about this in my next post).

Our minimum upload is usually 120GB at any one time, and sometimes, due to overseas server breakdown or changeovers etc, we need to upload around 4TB of data. Once God’s Way Ltd begins producing data, the upload requirements will quadruple. A 4TB upload would take 890 hours or more from our location (assuming the link did not fail). Uploads from an Australian internet connection in our location actually take much longer than physically sending via air freight a data package to Gene in the USA, and then remotely controlling the USA servers to upload the data worldwide, to our Canada server, YouTube, AWS and other services.

Jesus is able to remotely secure access the USA servers from any place in the world. Via this connection, he is able to economically upload and download data using the much higher speed and unlimited bandwidth allowances provided by internet connections in the United States.

We purchased the USA servers at our own expense (for around $30,000 USD, or $46,000 AUD total) in March 2018 (4.5 years ago) and had them sent to Gene’s home in Baltimore at the time. We also contribute to the monthly payment for the 1gbit/sec connection which our servers use at his home.

In 2021 Gene relocated to Florida, and eventually purchased a house in Sarasota, Florida. He continued to host the servers in each home he lived in, and in his current home, and while we haven’t uploaded new material to the internet in the past few years, Jesus continued to use the servers regularly to transfer data to us, to upload data to a replacement Canada server, and Jesus has continued to maintain the servers and keep them up to date in terms of software.

Although these servers are large, noisy and heavy, they store all of our shared public data, are very reliable, and can be remotely powered on and off (which is essential because Gene is often not home). These servers have played an essential part in our being able to share Divine Truth for free.

Hurricane Ian

At the end of September 2022 Hurricane Ian made landfall almost directly above Gene’s home in Sarasota, Florida. Gene and his partner Marina were forced to evacuate and their home suffered major structural and water damage as a large tree fell through the roof. One end of the home is relatively unscathed, but the other end, where Gene’s office and our servers were located, are damaged the most.

Gene and Marina’s clothing survived the Hurricane, but Gene’s office and the regions surrounding it, did not. They had to relocate to a motel for a few weeks until the structural damage could be assessed. Obviously since then they have been very busy, and do not know how long it will take to get their life back to normal, given the shortage of resources and workers after such a large disaster.

Their home was insured but as you can see from the photos there was a lot of damage to their house and personal possessions. At the moment he and Marina are living in motels.

If you would like to help Gene and Marina, there are a number of ways you can do so:

• If anyone in the West Coast of Florida between Sarasota, FL and Venice, FL has a short term rental property that Gene and Marina can rent while they are waiting for the insurance situation to play out, and the house repairs to be complete, please email Gene: emindonline@gmail.com
• If you would like to send any physical items, please email Eugene for a current address beforehand as his address is constantly changing at the moment.
• If you would like to help Gene and Marina financially as they get back to normal, you can gift to them via Transferwise. Details and instructions are listed on Gene’s webpage: https://emindonline.wordpress.com/

Prior to Hurricane Ian making landfall, before leaving his home in a rush, Gene did his best to store and protect our servers. However due to the high amount of damage to his home they were not fully protected. Although his home was insured, our servers are not.

So for many reasons, we have decided it is best for Gene to remove all of the drives from our servers (which are 35 x 4TB capacity, heavy and more than 6 years old) and give them away. Then he will send the servers back to us here in Wilkesdale, Queensland, Australia for Jesus to repair and repurpose to use in our racks here.

Jesus is also now building new, smaller servers which he can remote control (16 core XeonD processor, 128GB RAM, 80TB storage, video rendering) which cost around $12,000 AUD each.  We intend to send these to Gene when his life is back to normal and his home is repaired, which may take some months or longer. While we have no servers in the USA, we will be unable to upload data to the internet, unless the data sizes are small enough to do it directly using our connections in Australia.

If you would like to contribute towards the costs of air freight to have the servers sent back to Australia (this is expected to be around $3000 USD or more), towards the repairs of the servers, or towards the new server setup in Gene’s home, then you can donate to us via the ‘Divine Truth General Expenses’ option on the donations page

https://www.divinetruth.com/sites/main/en/index.htm#donate.htm

As always, Jesus and I are grateful for your interest in our work sharing Divine Truth with the world. We would like to thank you for your interest in supporting the volunteers who help us as well.

Next week I will write a long update on what we have been doing this year.

With our love,

Mary & Jesus