As you likely have noticed, The Thunderbolt BBS has been offline for
quite awhile of late. This is due to several reasons:

1) Thunderstorms. Arkansas is in the east end of Tornado Alley, and in
the west end of Dixie Alley. And, most of our severe weather is in the overnight hours...plus, I've seen storms develop in as little as 20
minutes, and move as fast as 90 mph.

2) ISP Roulette. I had originally dropped Xfinity for cost, and was going
to go to a different ISP...but this was the outcome:

A) T-Mobile had poor signal strength (barely 2 bars).
B) AT&T had poor signal strength, and very poor customer service.
C) Earthlink could not find a place to hook up the fiber optic connection.

So, I went back to Xfinity, and got it a bit cheaper, without any TV
channels (the 2 sets here haven't been powered up in over 3 years, since
before I had to put my Mom in a nursing home before her death in August,
2019). However, I am locked out of the router, so I can't get "bridge mode" activated, since I have port forwarding with my LinkSys EA7300 Router. As
a result, only I can get in on the LAN to read and post messages.

However, thanks to info from Michael Dippel, coordinator of HobbyNet, I'm
now signed up with DrServer.Net, and am working on putting the BBS into
the cloud on a Windows 10 32-bit server.

Unfortunately, with Arkansas entering the height of its spring tornado season, it will be a few days before I can finish this. The main changes will be:

A) A new address -- I won't post it out yet, as it's not yet active.
B) No more downtimes for thunderstorms, or for power or internet outages.

If I can just get the firewall in the system to accept the various logon
ports, all will be good...and I won't lose any of the legacy doorgames.

I will post an updated message when the move is completed. While I can
pickup and receive FTN and QWK mail packets, no one can connect to the
BBS at this time. That will change once the weather calms down, and I
can get the setup totally in the cloud.

Today was the BBS's 29th birthday...I originally thought I'd be giving
it "last rites"...but if this works, it should be up 24/7, except for
the nightly processing of message areas, files, and doorgames.

Daryl Stout, WX4QZ, Sysop
The Thunderbolt BBS, Little Rock, Arkansas

... Do You Sysop, Take This BBS, to be your lawfully wedded spouse??
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