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September 2026: bTen goes live

An SGI Challenge S, collected from the UK in person, took its first member logins over SSH. Before that, a member's slow tunnel turned into an audit of how bandwidth limits are applied everywhere. And we worked out what Nekotopia actually is and rewrote the site to say it.

Written up afterwards

Written on 25 September 2026 from our session notes and commit history. This one covers September so far.

What shipped

8 Sep: a 1 Mbit/s mystery. A member's tunnel was crawling, and it looked like a licensing problem on the router. It wasn't. A leftover speed limit from a member who'd moved hubs long ago was matching a reissued address, stacked on a second forgotten limit. With both removed, that link went from about 50 KB/s to over 6 MB/s. Then we fixed the cause: speed limits now come from one policy that every part of the platform reads, a sweep checks every device for drift every few hours, and deleting an account confirms every device actually removed that member's rules.

13 Sep: see your usage. The dashboard and the iOS app show your monthly allowance, what you've used, when it resets, and live upload and download meters. If the numbers are stale, it says so instead of guessing. Clearer names for the connection toggles landed the same day (Tunnel Enable, Torus Access, nSolo Access and so on), each with a short explanation.

18 Sep: HTTP/2. The public site had been pinned to HTTP/1.1 at the CDN. It now serves HTTP/2; every public route rechecked afterwards.

20 Sep: bTen goes live. The first member logged in over SSH to an SGI Challenge S, collected in person on a trip to the UK in August and September, through the Torus jump host, with a short permanent login and a home directory that survives maintenance. Access can be closed instantly, for the whole room or a single machine. The bTen page introduces the room, and the member guides include a plain statement of what it is and isn't: 30-year-old hardware run as-is, no uptime promises, and please don't use it as a launch pad. The story of how it got here is on video: Jim Clark put Netscape into Silicon Graphics. I'm putting WebFORCE into nekotopia.io. Admins can request a clean, verified shutdown for maintenance, and a rotating pool of spare system images lets the machine be reset to a known-good state quickly.

22 Sep: the room on camera. Two webcams in the machine room stream to signed-in members on the bTen page and a new Server Room page. They go through a narrowly scoped relay that forwards only those two feeds, so no camera credentials ever reach a browser. It replaces an older camera integration with far broader access than it needed.

24 Sep: what we actually are. An audit of the signup funnel showed nobody genuine was being turned away; the problem was reach. The homepage and signup now say what Nekotopia is: a community network for retro computing and homelabs, run by network engineers, in the same family as dn42, the HE tunnel broker, SDF and NYC Mesh. It also states how exposure works: your machine is reachable only on the mesh until you publish a port, take a dedicated address or announce your own routes.

Also in September:

  • One type scale and page layout across the public site; the sponsorship page is now Accounts.
  • The Platform menu split into three: Neko Pages, bTen and Server Room.
  • Routine rotation of management credentials on network hardware.
  • The iOS app reached a 1.0 release candidate, with a Torus console, bTen, usage gauges and passkey sign-in. It isn't on TestFlight or the App Store yet; the iOS app, so far has the full story.

What broke, and what we fixed

  • bTen lockouts. For a couple of days bTen's safety controller misread its own state and locked members out. Two separate causes: a text-parsing timing bug, and a date format that only appeared after 24 hours of uptime. Both fixed; access stayed open through the stability test that followed.
  • Spurious logouts. A brief network blip could bounce you to the login screen with a perfectly good session. Fixed.
  • Rate limits. The web dashboard and the app checking the same account could trip a limit sized for one client. Resized.
  • Wrong country. The dashboard sometimes showed our CDN edge's location instead of yours. It now separates your own address and location from your tunnel's.

By the numbers

79 changes to the platform repository between 1 and 25 September.