RE: *** ADMIN: Back on the air -- MI400

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Esteemed Ladies & Gentlemen of the midrange.com lists:

In my private email posts with David, I have come to learn the
following:

* Revenues that David depends on to run midrange.com are not meeting
current expenses and projected expenses necessary to keep midrange.com
operating on a reliable basis.  The web site's banner advertising "never
took off" and "book sales have dropped off severely".
* By saying "operating on a reliable basis", I mean that, currently,
these high-volume lists are running from old, long-serving hardware.
Sooner or later (probably sooner), that hardware will have to be
replaced.
* It should come as no surprise to anybody that a PC hard drive could
fail without a moment's notice.  Reliability could be vastly improved by
upgrading to a RAID controller and a pair of hard drives.
* There are approximately 900 subscribers to Midrange-L.  I didn't get
numbers for the other lists.

Therefore, WITHOUT DAVID'S KNOWLEDGE OR PERMISSION, I am asking all of
you who have not already donated and have realized ANY benefit from the
existence of these lists (don't forget the archives, the FAQs, etc.), to
please consider making a donation.  $1 (ONE stinkin' little DOLLAR) from
each subscriber would go a LONG way to secure a more reliable list
server which, quite frankly, I have come to depend on in many
circumstances.  To make a donation, please visit
http://www.midrange.com/contributions.htm for a mailing address, or for
a link to PayPal.  It is interesting to note that I basically had to
drag this link out of David, and the link is nowhere to be found on the
home page.  I think David really, REALLY has a hard time asking for
funding help.

My check for $10 is in the mail.

Dan Bale
IT - AS/400
Handleman Company
248-362-4400  Ext. 4952
D.Bale@Handleman.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Gibbs [SMTP:david@midrange.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 8:41 PM
> To:   midrange-l@midrange.com
> Subject:      *** ADMIN: Back on the air
>
> Ok folks, I think we're back online.
>
> Here's the upshot ... boot drive on my linux system failed
> completely.  Unforunately, there was no warning ... so I couldn't get
> things transferred over before the failure happened.
>
> I think all the tape backup had everything that is necessary ... but
> not
> all the system stuff.  I ended up upgrading to redhat 7.2 in order to
> get
> things working.
>
> My plan is to get another 20gb hard drive and setup a mirrored set ...
> so
> that if I have another drive failure, it won't impact as much.  I'm
> also
> keeping everything on a single drive so it's easier to fix in the
> future (I
> used to put the operating system on one drive, data on another ...
> unfortunately, this caused some headaches).
>
> We'll see how things go for the next few days.
>
> david