[ct-user] CT Vault is back up

[Mike Walker]

Jim

Good email.  I'd like to thank you for all the work you and your team does to keep this site up.  I know exactly what you are going through!

Very classic case of Murphy. 

Mike VA3MW

At 05:04 PM 11/9/99 , Jim Reisert AD1C wrote:

>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
>
>
>--
>Submissions:              ct-user@contesting.com
>Administrative requests:  ct-user-REQUEST@contesting.com
>WWW:                      http://www.k1ea.com/
>Questions:                owner-ct-user@contesting.com
>

=================================================
Mike Walker VA3MW
Corbeil Contest Club
http://www.qrz.com/wrad/directory.cgi?VA3MW


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