It's been quite a while since I have had time to do any maintenance work on the server but I have managed to shoe-horn some available time for this Sunday.

Maintenance work will include operating system updates and the application of a new SSL certificate which will allow secure connections for a further year. In other news, the domain licence for the site has been renewed for another two years.

As far as replacing the forums is concerned, this is still on the cards however I have been unhappy with trials of three systems that I have been experimenting with. The support forums for one have been pretty abysmal and seem to be more of a pathway to the subscription version which I refuse to entertain. One of the other forums do not have an ongoing support programme and the remaining one was simply no longer supported by the vendor however was given a look because it was previously used by me years ago when operating other websites.

A fourth system will be installed whilst I am on leave over the next few weeks and will undergo testing. It is supposed to be a good system and has some good reviews.


The maintenance work for this Sunday will involve brief outages as the server will require rebooting. These outages will be kept to a minimum, as far as possible and the work will be done by 12:00, NSW time.

The work outlined above is now complete. VR now has an SSL certificate in place for the next year and thus, we'll avoid what happened a few years ago when the provider didn't send a renewal request out and we were stuck with red address bars for about a week. As a result of that I use a different provider now.

Many thanks for your time and effort Brad. Rest assured it is not wasted.

This is a fantastic site where like-minded people can swap yarns, information and advice without the general anxieties often found in other
forums.

Well done!