This month's meeting is special

[Brian Cluff]

On 05/07/2018 04:00 PM, Carruth, Rusty wrote:
> (when we had the 'free' url.. um, lets see plug.az.us? see, I remember a little, anyway ;-)
I wish our free domain was that nice.  It was actually 
plug.phoenix.az.us.  It was so hard to remember for new people that I 
forwarded, as a joke, a 3rd level domain to it from a domain I owned 
thus creating one of the least forgettable URLs ever of plug.mybutt.net, 
which still works to this day <grin>.

We ended up loosing the plug.phoenix.az.us domain when DERU, our hosting 
provider, who just happened to also be the registrar for all 
*.phoenix.az.us domains, went out of business over night.  Luckily I got 
wind of the shutdown, and I was able to pull a back up of the servers 
and moved them to their current location.
Since the owner of DERU just walked away from his data center leaving 
everyone locked out of their servers I didn't know when I would be able 
to change the name servers for that domain to point to the new location, 
so I registered the current phxlinux.org as a new, easier to remember, 
permanent address.  The idea was that I would eventually point the old 
domain at the site as well, once we were able to get control of it 
again.  As it turned out, the powers that be decided to just shut down 
all the *.phoenix.az.us domains, so it is now gone forever.
We also never did see our (donated by me) servers again.  I suspect that 
they were sold at auction when the creditors came to collect their 
money.  Luckily they were old and there wasn't anything on them that I 
wouldn't have given a copy of to pretty much anyone, if someone had 
asked, other than the password file, but that was fixed by setting a new 
password on the new server.  Still it was annoying to have our servers 
essentially stolen, but I also can really complain too much since they 
gave us years of free hosting which greatly exceeded the worth of those 
server, even when they were new, so if the went to help pay off their 
debt, however small, then that's the least we could do.

Brian Cluff