Back in February 2001, during the week before ARRL DX CW, the
contesting.com server which hosted the DATOM Engineering web site crashed
hard. Besides being a horrible time to happen with the contest around the
corner, your's truly was in the Caribbean at WP2Z and out of touch. Arrgghh!
In subsequent weeks, the crew at the Akorn ISP got the servers up and
running again. Eventually the DATOM Engineering site appeared again, but
nobody could access the download site. DATOM's webmaster Tom, WB8VMN
looked into this, contacted Akorn, and determined what was missing was
something called "MS FrontPage Extentions", which provided the services
required to run many of the features of the site, such as the secured
download page. Without these services, Tom could not even get into the
site itself to post a "Sorry, this site is busted - please stand by"
message on the home page.
To make a long story short, the DATOM Web Site had been hosted for free
courtesy of Bill, W4AN founder of Akorn. Because of our "free" status, we
were hosted on an older server that receives less support than the newer
servers hosting paying clients. Week after week we waited patiently for
the FrontPage Extentions to be installed so that we could get the site back
in business. Finally, the word came down that due to factors beyond
Akorn's control, they could not promise when our server would be back 100%
and they recommended that we migrate to their "commercial" server where the
support would be guaranteed.
In early May, plans to do just that were put into motion. Because we
switched servers we had to go get our own URL. Unfortunately, datom.com is
taken by some outfit in W6 with an "under construction" web site last
updated in February 1999! So, our new URL will be
http://www.datomonline.com (that's DATOM Online run together). It takes
some time for a new domain name to work its way through the DNS servers,
but by now you should be able to simply log into the site by name.
Tom has been working to reorganize the site better and to freshen up the
appearance. Once the site us back up and running we'll go back and work on
some of the content, like the program descriptions which are useful to
interested buyers. We hope to also resuscitate interest in the Datom Tech
Notes, where items like K2KW's recent discussion on the use of NAU for file
merging would be in interest.
Most importantly, the web site needs to be back in place to serve the users
who need to download updated versions of the program. One of the biggest
problems from the move to a new server is that we cannot retrieve the old
list of users on the old system - we'll have to type these in by hand
(actually, cut and paste from a list).
With the June VHF QSO Party coming up this weekend, several people have
asked when a new NA would be ready. Version 10.53 is pretty much ready to
go. This version has a number of new or revised features, along with a
number of bug fixes. Amoung the stuff of interest to the VHF crowd, the
computer control for ICOM radios now works correctly on bands above 100
MHz. Also, the IC-706 MKIIG is added as a supported radio type, and a bug
which truncated the grid square field in the ADIF file ha been fixed (again!).
I spoke to Tom this evening and he is targeting having the new web site up
and running Thursday evening (the evening of June 7, 2001 here in the
USA). The last thing we'll do is upload the user names and passwords for
the download site, so please don't try accessing the download page until
Friday. Since the VHF contest does not start until Saturday, this gives
the users time to get the new version set up, and K8CC will be monitoring
the web site Friday evening and Saturday morning for support.
We'd like to thank the users for their patience as we've tried to get the
situation with the web site under control. A lot of the delay was out of
our hands, but to us the reasons were understandable and not a reflection
on Akorn. We're confident this new arrangement will provide even better
service for the NA users in the future.
Dave Pruett, K8CC
Tom Pruett, WB8VMN
DATOM Engineering
datom@contesting.com
http://www.datomonline.com
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