Keep and Bear Arms - Gun Owners Home Page




	Explanation of Recent Site Outage Explanation of Recent Site Outage August 29, 2003 KeepAndBearArms.com -- Our daily readers noticed this last week that we were unexpectedly offline -- our site was down. This outage was unplanned. Dealing with it this last week has been a frustrating mess. We owe our supporters an explanation. On Thursday, August 21, our Chief Technical Officer downloaded a server software update from Microsloth---er, um, Microsoft. Shortly after he installed the patch, one system after another began failing -- and down we went. Attempts at resuscitation by our technical team of over three years proved fruitless. One system fix would work only to have another fail. It was maddening, and very time consuming. When our technical support teammates reached their collective wits end, we reached out for assistance from our supporters. Many offers of help were received, and all were and are very deeply felt and appreciated. We opted to give KABA member and supporter Sean Glazier full Admin access to everything. We trusted him with KABA's guts, and our trust proved well placed. He worked 13+ hours on Wednesday the 27th and several more hours on the 28th -- and he found and solved several problems caused by the Microsludge patch. He even used his own credits with Microslurp's tech support to get the help he needed to get us back online. (He paid Microsoft to fix a problem they caused, actually. What a racket.) There are still some needs for systemic cleanup on our server. In fact, Sean and others have recommended that we wipe our server's hard drives and do a clean reinstall from scratch. Having been on the same server -- which KABA owns -- since March of 2000, contiguous daily use virtually the entire time, this is probably good counsel. We'll be looking to do just that at some point in the not too distant future -- with advance notice before any downtime that may be necessary, if any. When we bought our server, it was considered rather fast and modern. 650MHZ with RAID controllers was state of the art back then. Now, it's kind of a dinosaur. We'd love to modernize and pick up speed. (We'd love to banish Microsoft from our lives, too.) Current financial reality precludes that option; we've put everything we've had these last several months toward the Silveira v. Lockyer Second Amendment lawsuit, now on appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court. A donation of a better server would be most welcome. Meanwhile, we'll make do with what we have and press on. If you are one of over 3,000 users of our free email system and were unable to access your account, words cannot express our frustration on that point. We only hoped our free email users remembered that our mail server is separate from our site server -- and that the mail server has a different address from which you are able to connect. Most people just log in from the upper right side of our home page. But you can also check your email from here: http://mail.KeepAndBearArms.com:8383. Please click to and bookmark that page, for future reference -- and please forgive us for any inconvenience this may have caused. So... did you miss your daily KABA fix? Nothing else quite like KeepAndBearArms.com on the internet, is there? If you're one of many who've long visited our website but have yet to support us, perhaps you might be inclined to lend us a helping hand now. Because we've devoted the vast majority of our donations to fight a Second Amendment lawsuit these last few months, we've fallen on lean times and could sincerely use your support. Here's how: Become a Member Online: https://www.KeepAndBearArms.com/custaccount/ Become Member By Mail: http://KeepAndBearArms.com/members/mail.htm *Donate to General Operations or Silveira v. Lockyer* Lawsuit Fund:** https://www.KeepAndBearArms.com/donations