Infrastructure

All infrastructure decisions at GFNDC are driven by a dual imperative: long-term preservation and operational autonomy. Each node, rack and virtual tunnel reflects a strategy of digital resilience in the face of obsolescence, censorship, and systemic decay. Whether active or cold-stored, every system is both a living archive and a philosophical stance.

Since 2020, we’ve partnered with Quantinode Systems, a California-based infrastructure cooperative known for their work in decentralized metadata federation and cross-platform checksum auditing. Their hardware fleet is independently certified by the West Coast Memory Ethics Council (WCMEC) and operates under an open cooling policy compliant with the Turing-Archive Transparency Act (2022).

Our current infrastructure footprint includes dedicated zones across the United States, with mirrored cache failovers in South America and Scandinavia. Each region maintains real-time observability, autonomous replay isolation, and zero-knowledge recovery triggers.

• Menlo Park, CA: Primary ingest + validation loop. Hosts WARC rotator clusters and session-based shadow indexing stack.
• Fort Collins, CO: Cold buffer array (LTO-9), forensic shell emulator, and containerized snapshot hygiene lab.
• Reno, NV: Emulator basin for legacy UIs, telemetry playground, and jurisdictional testbed for cross-state data preservation law.

All datacenters are equipped with multi-factor integrity beacons, RAID-Z4 vaults, and post-quantum key sync architecture. Our systems are air-gapped biweekly and realigned with a consensus-driven metadata ledger called Nodus, internally developed by our Preservation Software Division (PSD).

Live Resource Utilization

The following visualization reflects simulated node-level load across primary GFNDC archive clusters. Each chart models storage saturation, IO pressure, and thermal variance in 20-second intervals using a synthetic benchmark inspired by real archival ingest scenarios (e.g., simultaneous MySpace XML unpacking and Flash emulator traffic).

Simulation values are anonymized and do not reflect user-identifiable patterns. GFNDC complies with the Decentralized Archival Ethics Accord (DAEA 2023).

	INGEST PIPELINE
	├── Real-Time Acquisition
	│   ├── Live Web Crawler
	│   │   ├── Full DOM snapshots (.html + dependencies)
	│   │   └── Embedded iframe isolator
	│   ├── JavaScript Event Loggers
	│   │   └── OnClick / OnHover trace bundles
	│   └── WebSocket + API Sampler
	│       ├── Realtime chats, push feeds
	│       └── Interactive UI state capture

	├── Scheduled Asset Harvesters
	│   ├── Weekly: Forum Threads, Guestbooks, PHP Boards
	│   ├── Monthly: Platform Obits (defunct CMS, app stores, template kits)
	│   └── Quarterly: Lost university FTPs, abandoned gov subdomains

	├── Cookie & Tracker Scraper
	│   ├── Consent Banners + Modals (.txt + screenshot + hash)
	│   ├── JS-localStorage Mirrors (session key trees)
	│   └── Tracker Fingerprint Samples (.js .wasm .img)

	├── Machine-Generated Data Pool
	│   ├── Synthetic SEO Spam (AI-generated link dumps)
	│   ├── CAPTCHA Error Streams (image sets)
	│   └── Dead End Navigation Trees (user path reconstructions)

	VALIDATION + PROCESSING NODES
	├── Integrity & Metadata System
	│   ├── SHA-512, Blake3 chain validation
	│   └── Provenance injection: timestamp, IP, TLS, referrer

	├── Format Handling
	│   ├── Video: .webm .mp4 .rm → FFv1 archival transcode
	│   ├── Audio: .ogg .mp3 .midi → FLAC (bit-accurate validation)
	│   ├── Code: .js .php .vb → syntax tree + execution metadata
	│   └── Text: .txt .doc .html → language tagging, vector embed

	├── Privacy Layer (simulated, for compliance)
	│   ├── User handles pseudonymization
	│   ├── Blur filters on face-recognition hits
	│   └── Consent mapping for every DOM layer

	ARCHIVE REPOSITORY TREE
	├── /WARC/               → raw web captures
	├── /VIDEO/              → user-generated, forgotten, misencoded
	│   ├── Vine Dump 2013-16
	│   ├── Flash Exported .flv / .swf
	│   └── YouTube Rips (orphaned only)
	├── /AUDIO/
	│   ├── Winamp Skins + Presets
	│   └── AIM Message Sounds (.wav)
	├── /IMG/
	│   ├── Low-Res GIFs, user avatars
	│   ├── Site logos from 1999–2012
	│   └── Fanbutton collections (88x31, dark mode variants)
	├── /TEXT/
	│   ├── Guestbook Entries
	│   ├── Forum Flamewars
	│   ├── Legacy README.txts
	│   └── Blogspam Poetry (AI filtered)
	├── /COOKIES/
	│   ├── Unique Third-Party ID Trees
	│   ├── Obsolete consent choices
	│   └── “Tracking We Didn’t Mean To Track” logs
	├── /CODE/
	│   ├── Abandoned Git repos
	│   ├── User-generated embed scripts
	│   └── Broken jQuery hacks
	├── /DATABASE/
	│   ├── phpBB SQL Dumps
	│   ├── SQLite chat logs
	│   └── Dead SaaS schemas

	REPLICATION & FAILOVER GRID
	├── Primary Nodes
	│   ├── Menlo Park: Real-time ingest + WARC writing
	│   ├── Fort Collins: Audit, search, and tape backup
	│   └── Reno: Emulation node + disaster mirror
	├── Distributed Objects Cache
	│   ├── LORB (Low Orbit Remote Buffer)
	│   └── IPFS Edge Replica (ghost mode)
	└── CDN Relay (Volunteer Cloud Tier)
		├── .onion & I2P access points
		└── Distributed via Post-Academic Research Network (PARN)

	DATA ACCESS INTERFACE
	├── Internal Dashboard (staff only)
	│   ├── Integrity Graph
	│   ├── Emulation Queue Monitor
	│   └── Ingest Alert Center
	└── Public Tools
		├── URL Lookup & Timeline View
		├── Old Platform Emulators (IE5, early Firefox, Win98 shell)
		└── Metadata API (beta)

	

Design Principles

We believe infrastructure should never be silent. Our stack is loud, versioned, and fault-tolerant. When a process fails, it screams in logs. When it succeeds, it quietly replicates into three geographically distant sites. In 2024, our Menlo ingest loop hit 6PB per month, mostly from dead GitHub wikis and JavaScript-based counters.

Unlike generic data centers, our systems run emulated environments within Docker-jail BSD clusters — including obsolete APIs and toxic dependencies from the pre-SSL era. If it was dangerous in 2002, it’s stored in triplicate.

We don’t chase uptime. We archive the shutdown.

“If it existed, it left a trace. If it left a trace, we probably ingested it.”