Once again, we are back, asking regulars and lurkers alike for help in keeping this unique journalistic/internet asset alive and well. Come September 11th Rantburg will mark its 23rd year in operation, procuring news and commentary on the global war on terrorism. In the past we also have provided original news that no other news outlet on the planet would provide, as well as original commentary. We have a set of moderators who provide ongoing services in helping to procure items on a daily basis for Rantburg, commentary, and help in dealing with the more rowdy customers.
But there has been a change.
Fred wants to retire. He wants to remove himself from maintaining the server, and he wants to maintain an Emeritus status for himself. The task of maintaining the server, from the iron, to the operating system, to the server software will fall to me.
I encourage Fred to continue to do many of the things he still can for this community: his writing, his programming, his inline commentary, and his moderating. So, for as long as he can continue doing all this, he will benefit from these fundraisers.
In the background, I have been working to harden my own server for the eventual handover of Rantburg. My server currently works as a backup server for Rantburg, as well as a server for my own websites and my mail server. The plan is for my server to take over functions that his server has, once he decides when to make that happen.
When he does, he will point his name server to my server, after which there will be a brief 24 to 48 hour stretch of time while his DNS data propagates. Once complete, Rantburg will be live and hosted on 1dogstar.net.
But there's a hitch: I have zero clue as to how 1dogstar.net will handle Rantburg. Among the work done to 1dogstar.net was the installation of a default deny firewall, which seems to work fairly well. But the server has not been stress tested, so I have no idea how well 1dogstar.net will take the handoff.
If 1dogstar.net cannot handle the load — though there's no reason to think that it won't — at that point I will decide to move Rantburg to a completely new server.
The pluses to moving Rantburg to 1dogstar.net to a new server are huge. Back in the ancient days, Fred collocated his server at a data center in Maryland for which he paid for bandwidth and assumed all hardware costs for the server. But when a hard drive or a network card stopped working, he would be forced to go to the data center with another computer, bringing Rantburg down while he worked to restore his server and transfer the data to another new server.
All of this represented time and money which Fred happily expended to keep his project going. These are tasks that I sympathize with, when I tried to maintain a web hosting, web business using servers and bandwidth out of my own internet provider. Potentially, the hardware costs were staggering, and that is when I decided to rent my own hardware.
1dogstar.net has been in continual operation for 20 years come November, and in that time that server has never suffered a failure in hardware, nor has there been an outage of any kind in the data center that I use.
I have been with this company, Server Pronto, since 2004, and they are absolutely reliable. They happen to be among the least expensive providers of dedicated servers that I am aware of. In that time, after my business failed, I continued to use the free BSD operating system for web hosting on a rented server.
So, at least those are the plans. The main reason why I would prefer Fred to continue his activities is that Rantburg is his life's work. And Rantburg, as far as we have been able to divine, provides unique news and commentary on those who would destroy our way of life that no one else provides. As the oath I and many others in this forum have taken in the past states, this server, the moderators, and its regulars provide journalism that reports on the activities of our enemies both foreign and domestic.
Another benefit to the above described plans is that the Officer's Club, with the names officersclub.1dogstar.net wheelus.1dogstar.net and o-club.org ( the link of which is on the sidebar) will be on a separate host in case of the unlikely event of a failure.
Those sites are active as I write this, albeit there are problems with o-club.org since it is a redirect to wheelus1.1dogstar.net I will resolve that in time.
Other backup assets for maintaining communications are
Discord ( invite link: https://discord.gg/genaf5C4 )
The putrefying https://oclub.1dogstar.net/
My Facebook account https://www.facebook.com/chris.covert.1441
My gmail account grurkka
My X/twitter account badanov
Your much appreciated donations can be sent through the Paypal link on the sidebar, or through gmail. Fred.Pruitt iffin you want to go through the Zelle route or the mail route.