[ct-user] CT Vault is back up

[Jim Reisert AD1C]

The CT Vault at http://www.contesting.com/ctvault finally appears to be 
back up.  Thanks to Bill Fisher, W4AN and his staff at akorn.net for 
getting it back on-line.

Unfortunately, the data on the site is from a few weeks back (last full 
backup they had), but I am sure that K1EA will upload CT 9.45 and CT 9.46 
to the web as soon as possible.  I will fix up the links to the database 
files when I get home tonight.

Now, a little history about what happened:

Some time late Thursday night local (early Friday a.m. UTC), someone made a 
mistake and wiped out a good portion of the www.contesting.com web 
site.  This took out not only the CT vault, but the WriteLog and NA web 
sites as well. That person (who shall go unnamed) informed Bill W4AN 
immediately that he had made a mistake.  But Bill was in Reno, NV getting 
for operating SS from K5RC's QTH and could not get things back up from there.

To compound problem, Matt KC1XX and his family were out of town on vacation 
so they could not respond to problems at any of the CT telephone 
numbers.  K1EA and I responded as promptly as we could to direct E-mail 
requests for the updated software by E-mailing CT out as an attachment (or 
a pointer to another site) to anyone who asked, no questions asked.  During 
Saturday, my E-mail connection was down for several hours somewhere between 
MIT and MediaOne, but I was still able to access my mail on 
contesting.com.  I came in from yard work just about every hour to check 
for any new messages, to get guys going in time for the contest.

In short, it was a mistake, that was exacerbated by the site owner and the 
CT sales and support force being out of town.  We tried to handle the 
problem as best we could.  We did NOT announce to the reflector that the 
site was down, in my opinion to avoid the "hoarding" problem whenever there 
is a shortage of something (i.e. if you tell everyone that something is not 
available, they will ask for it anyway, even if they don't need it).  We're 
sorry it took so long for the site to get back on-line.

Fortunately, we did not get too many angry messages.  But there is a lesson 
to be learned here.  The rule changes had been announced for several 
months.  CT 9.42 was released on October 3 to handle the new rules, a full 
month before the contest.  Therefore, there was plenty of time for people 
to download the updated software before the contest, and obviously many 
did.  It is unfortunate that some decided to wait until the last 
minute.  CT is a work in progress.  As such, there are likely to be 
problems with the software in YOUR particular situation which can not be 
resolved in the hour or minutes before the contest.  Therefore, it is 
prudent to download the software early and try it out in your station well 
before the contest, in case you need to contact the support staff or K1EA 
for help or a bug fix.  Does your company use untested software in a 
production environment?  It's not a good idea in a contest either.

In closing, it's only a hobby.  Even if you had the old version of CT, you 
could make notes during the contest for the occasional QSO that didn't log 
properly, so you could fix them up after the contest.  And paper and pencil 
still work, and probably will for as long as they make paper and pencils.

73 - Jim AD1C

--
Jim Reisert AD1C <jjreisert@alum.mit.edu>
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/ad1c/    <---- new home


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