I did have a nice little chat with Michael Hubbard earlier this afternoon (and dropped him a follow-up e-mail regarding our conversation and Cced Jim Stockford). Anyway, understandably, he doesn't have time to do routine updates to web pages on the www.balug.org. host, but is willing to provide the access necessary so that we should be able to manage things there for ourselves (and/or fix things and transition off of there - as is our general slightly longer term plan ... a plan which is already fairly well underway).

He may not be able to get to it "immediately", but hopefully by about middle of next week or so, I should have the necessary access on the existing www.balug.org. host to be able to fix the stuff on the web site that's broken, and likely also be able to fix and/or backup/retrieve other web pages and data from there that's of interest to us (e.g. about 3 years of BALUG wiki pages (such as meeting presentation notes, and other miscellaneous useful stuff)). Anyway, I'm at least rather optimistic that within about a week's time or less, we'll at least be able to make some critically overdue updates on the existing main BALUG web page, and I'm also rather optimistic that, moving forward, we'll be able to reasonably smoothly fix and/or transition, as appropriate, existing balug.org. stuff to location(s) and setup(s) where we'll be better situated to manage that going forward (e.g. higher availability location(s) and configuration(s), better and more regular backups, more feasible physical access if/when needed, etc.)

In the meantime, work continues to progress on the "new" (forthcoming) www.balug.org. site. For now, one can preview it at: http://208.96.15.254/ ... but no guarantees yet that it, or the content of the pages, are particularly stable yet - it *is* a work-in-progress at this point (and at the moment I'm still testing two quite different formats for the main page at http://208.96.15.254/). The 208.96.15.254 IP is on box in colo, courtesy of Jim Stockford (having provided the box) and the colo that's donated the space, power, bandwidth, and 3 useable IPv4 addresses. The box is primarily used by SF-LUG http://www.sf-lug.org/ http://www.sf-lug.com/ (sf-lug.com. and www.sf-lug.com. being hosted on that box), but is also shared for BALUG use (and BALUG is allowed exclusive use of the 208.96.15.254 IP).