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I’m leaving to St. Petersburg today with the intention to take the train to Polar Ural in three days.

I have been there in 2001, six years ago, and longing to get there again.

This region is a known touring place. Nowadays there are not so many places on the Earth where you can wonder for several weeks and meet not a single human being. Backpacking there is nothing like “hiking trip from a hotel to a restaurant” along marked route. There is no services - you just go wherever you can. No cellular network (and we don’t take a satellite phone, as it weighs over kilo). All food has to be carried - we plan to fit in 700g/day, which makes 15kg of “consumable” start weight.

More facts:

• The region is extremely wet. Expect your feet to be wet all the time. There is positively no reason to dry down the boots, as they fill up with the water during first 15 minutes of walk-time.
• The temperature can be anything between 0°C and 25°C. At 0, the rain with heavy wind makes for a rich experience. Snow is possible starting from beginning of August.
• If the weather is warm, there can be really much mosquitos and gnats. Normal situation is when you must wear mosquito mesh and gloves to protect. It is impossible to eat with the mesh; so eating becomes challenging and people eat either inside the tent or walking/running around.

We’ll have 3 weeks of full autonomy. My heart is already in the mountains.

I was a customer of saunalahti internet provider. Happily connected to their machines via SSH and maintained my rudimentary web pages.

Suddenly, the machine unix.saunalahti.fi disappeared. Soon it disappeared even from the nameserver. I discovered it after maybe a couple of months not accessing it.

Calling customer support. After usual 15 min. waiting in the queue:

(I) The Unix shell does not work.
(Saunalahti) I take a look at it… (waiting) Oh sorry, the Unix usernames were all removed.
(I) ??? I need Unix shell.
(S) We can restore it. (waiting) It is ready now.
(I) So what machine should I connect to?
(S) The same machine you connected earlier.
(I) But it is not even known to the nameserver! And it is your nameserver I’m using.
(S) I’ll look at it. (waiting) The other machine is ftp.saunalahti.fi
(I, feeling suspicious about such hostname and trying to connect) It does not let me in. Says “Connection closed by remote host”.
(S) OK, one moment… (waiting) the SSH access is closed now. (points me to their web page, saying that my contract does not include SSH access.)

I have nothing more to ask. The SSH access was an important feature for me and one of reasons why I’ve chosen this provider among others. Now they silently removed this reason without even a notice. The only way to maintain the web pages now is by FTP (sending password in clear text). I complained about the issue also on Saunalahti own webboard, other users confirmed the issue. I’m in search for another provider.