nnov.rfnet.ru was a Nizhny Novgorod address in the rfnet.ru domain, snapshots of which the web archive holds from 1999 to 2024. The root of the site was a service page: in 2001 it carried a single line of greeting and the signature “Copyright © 1999 RFnet-Nizhny Novgorod”[2], while the substantive pages lived in nested folders. Three different projects from this host made it into the Nizhny Novgorod catalogue and the Counter.nn.ru rating at once: the amateur radio site “RadioFanat” (Radio Fan)[6], the collection “Martial Arts of the Planet”[5] and a page on alternative medicine, “Tai-Pang”[10]. By 2013 the root held a library for radio amateurs[3], and by 2024 the default placeholder page of a web server[4].

RFnet — Nizhny Novgorod

The earliest snapshot of the home page is dated 2 October 1999[1]. The copy of 1 April 2001 shows an extremely spare splash page: the English-language greeting “Welcome to RFnet Nizhny Novgorod”, the subtitle “Information Technology Centre” and the line at the bottom, “Copyright © 1999 RFnet-Nizhny Novgorod”[2]. That is the entire text of the page: the archived copy contains no address, no telephone number, no list of services and no section menu. The 1999 copyright is the only indication of the time when the Nizhny Novgorod RFnet began operating[2].

What lived at the address

The Nizhny Novgorod catalogue nn.ru listed not nnov.rfnet.ru itself but the pages inside it, and sorted them into different sections.

“RadioFanat” (nnov.rfnet.ru/rf) was placed in the section “Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents : Personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents : Pages about anything at all” with the caption “The personal page of N. Bolshakov”[9]. The counter.nn.ru rating described it in more detail: “the site is devoted to amateur radio circuit design and contains around 1,000 circuits on various subjects”[6].

“Martial Arts of the Planet” (nnov.rfnet.ru/ek/) was kept by the catalogue in the section “Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents : Sport” with the description “Masters and styles. Theory and practice. Conference”; as of the check of 20 July 2000 the page was listed as working, and it had no rating of its own in that table[8].

“Tai-Pang” (nnov.rfnet.ru/tp), tagged “Alternative medicine”, stood in the section “Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents : Health care”[10].

The archived copies this article relies on were taken from the root of the site and do not show the contents of these three pages.

Position in the Nizhny Novgorod rating

The neighbours sharing the host carried very different weight. On 21 April 2000 “Martial Arts of the Planet” occupied the first line of the “Personalities” section: counter reading 12,753, rating 237.94, 198 hits[5]. “RadioFanat” ran in the overall standings of all Nizhny Novgorod sites: on 30 September 2000 it held the third line, with a counter of 150,591, a rating of 911.32 and 260 hits[7]; on 2 December it held the second, with a counter of 225,888, a rating of 2,384.90 and 805 hits[6]. The only site above it in the December table was a collection of guitar tablature[6]. By April 2002 the catalogue showed “RadioFanat” with a rating of 1,246.14[9].

For a personal page that is a high placing: the Nizhny Novgorod Internet at the turn of the century was densely populated with such private collections, but only a handful of them reached the top three of the overall standings (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). At the same time, neither the address itself nor its pages appear in the lists of entrants in the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[11].

The radio amateur's library

By 2013 the root of the site no longer held a service placeholder. The snapshot of 10 October 2013 shows a page headed “Radio-Lyubitel” (Radio Amateur) with a long section index of a technical library[3]. The menu opened with the section “New arrivals”, followed by “Antennas”, “Radio transmitters, radio stations”, “Units of amateur radio equipment”, “Radio reception”, “HF power amplifiers”, “Radio control equipment”, “AUDIO equipment”, “Automotive electronics”, “Consumer electronics”, “Applications of integrated circuits”, “Miscellaneous”, “Measuring instruments”, “Digital equipment”, “For the amateur constructor”, “Power supply”, “Telephony”, “Television”, “Reference materials”, “Amateur radio techniques”, “Mikro-spy”, “For the beginner radio amateur”, “Notes for the student” and “Amateur radio calculations”[3].

There are no contacts, no names of compilers and no mentions of the city in the saved text of the page — only the section index[3]. No direct evidence that this library grew out of “RadioFanat” was found in the surviving material; it can only be noted that both N. Bolshakov's collection of 2000 and the library of 2013 were collections of amateur radio circuits on one and the same host[6][3].

How it closed

The last web archive snapshot is dated 4 November 2024, and there is no site in it: the address returns the standard placeholder “Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page: It works”[4]. This is the page Apache shows immediately after installation, until the administrator replaces the file /var/www/html/index.html with content of their own[4]. The machine at the address responds, but there is no longer a site behind it.

In our register the address is listed as dead. Whether this is the same owner as in 1999 cannot be established from the archive: the RFnet splash page, the amateur radio library and the empty Ubuntu server share not a single signature. Where the library's material moved to, and what became of the collections on martial arts and on alternative medicine, could not be determined.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 1999 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2024 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rating, “Personalities” section, April 2000 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rating, overall standings, December 2000 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru rating, overall standings, September 2000 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, “Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents : Sport” section, 2000 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, “Personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents” section, 2002 (archive)
  10. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, “Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents : Health care” section, 2002 (archive)
  11. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)