[App_rpt-users] Response to the AllStarLink Board of Directors message from 29 December 2020

[Stacy]

A bit on this change:

Nobody on the admin side that runs what was the AllStarLink (ASL)
infrastructure (now PTTLink) was ever informed this was going to
happen.  Yesterday afternoon (12/29/20) at around 5:00 PM (Pacific) our
monitoring system started going crazy with alerts telling us systems
were down.  Investigation showed that the SOA record for allstarlink.org
was changed to what it is now (Cloudflare) and this broke numerous
things.  Both the wording and timing of this announcement is very much a
jab (or middle finger) pointed directly at me since I'm the main person
who has been running things.  I am one who has ensured that the ASL
Network (and associated infrastructure) remained operational and was
able to handle the increasingly growing number of nodes (well over
5,100).  This was done solely through me investing both my own time and
money without the help or participation of the ASL Board.  In addition
to this "re-engineering" I have also had my account on the ASL Slack
workspace suspended without notice and any and all admin access to the
ASL Web portal was removed too (among other things).

For quite some time, well before Bryan Fields (W9CR) or Fred Moses
(W8FSM) stopped their involvement in ASL directly, the AllStarLink, Inc
Board (ASL Board) has done its best to alienate, patronize, ridicule,
demean, and basically exclude the admin team from anything substantial
regarding the ASL infrastructure for which they had no understanding of
nor did they attempt to understand.   Numerous attempts were made by
myself and others to try to fix the issues that were very apparent, and
yet they were met with disdain and ignored.  This included on several
occasions attempts at impassioned pleas by myself and others directly to
the ASL Board members regarding the issues that we saw and asking for
reparations to make things better.   Of which included being open
regarding any decisions being made which directly affected the admin
team.  Additionally, any and all attempts to ask what is happening on/at
the board level regarding ASL were ignored or told that it didn't
involve or concern us.  Instead, they continued on the same course of
action that served to alienate more and more people from participating
in ASL on the admin side with the results of me being the sole admin
person left.

This "re-engineering" and the resulting chaos and outages are serve as a
testament to the ASL Board again attempting to change things without
understanding the system itself and without telling anyone.

> This is part of an ongoing two-year project to provide sufficient
resources for projected node growth and additional stability. In
addition, this will create a stable framework for new types of clients
to participate in the future.

Again, nobody told me (or anyone else associated with the admin team)
about this "two year project".  Each and every time the ASL Board has
attempted a change (and broken something), the current node registration
system was brought up.  For example, the Round Robin DNS (RRDNS) has
been a sticking point for a certain unnamed ASL Board member, and during
discussions this unnamed individual had the audacity to state that
DSNMGR messages regarding changes to the IP address of the server at
register.allstarlink.org was "trashing his node".   One of the long
since alienated admin team members had to explain that you could adjust
logging in Asterisk through a config file.  This is one of many examples
that demonstrated the lack of knowledge of AllStarLink, Asterisk, and
app_rpt by a  member of the ASL Board.  Yet we are to believe that a
"two year project" has been in the works by this same group that is
supposed be  a "re-engineered" system to promote growth and stability?

> You should also be aware that some specific volunteers (past and
current) have opposed this sort of design change and we suspect that you
may be reading negative comments from them on various platforms. The
board’s staffing goals are to promote technical innovation from as many
hams as want to get involved and bring new features and clients to Allstar.

Don't be fooled by this attempt at taking the high ground.  The
opposition they are implying results from attempts at changes from the
ASL Board without understanding the underlying technical issues behind
how/why things run and causing outages that they wouldn't (or couldn't)
fix.  Each and every time an ASL Board member brought up
"re-engineering" the registration system, the reply that I empathically
gave was that yes, the system can be improved upon but there needs to be
a plan.  I personally have stated that I am open to improvements to this
system that were the result of planning, testing and made sense.  The
ASL Board thought that moving the system to AWS or Google would "solve"
everything yet when pressed for details on how this would be done, we
were met with crickets or arguments that it was just better and that was
that.  And when asked about a budget for such a move we were again met
with silence.  The "resistance" that is alluded to was with regards to
actually sitting down and creating a plan on how to move forward with
"re-engineering" this system, and not just what amounted to throwing
scat at the wall and seeing what stuck (resulting in either myself or
others on the admin team having to figure out what broke and fix it,
since most of these changes were done without telling us).  At no point
during the any of occasions in which I said this has any ASL Board
member taken the initiative to actually have this discussion with me (or
anyone on the admin team) and come up with a viable plan to both
"re-engineer" and do a proper cut over that isn't as disruptive as the
one we are experiencing now.

There is a history of the ASL Board doing things that have broken
registration and parts of the infrastructure in the past, and this is no
different.

PTTLink was formed due to the ASL Board's actions which forked the
AllStarLink network by changing the DNS records without prior notice.

The PTTLink Network can be thought of as an "overlay" to what had been
in operation as the AllStarLink Network. This change was done simply by
changing the domain name in use on the servers to pttlink.org. Your
existing credentials will continue to work unless you change them. 
However, PTTLink, as a result of the ASL Board's egregious and careless
action, is now a separate entity from the AllStarLink Network. I call
upon the ASL Board to restore DNS back to the way it was before they
forked it, moving everything back to the perfectly working
infrastructure that uses what are now the pttlink.org servers. 
Additionally, I call upon them to restore all access that was revoked
from me (both recently, and that which was revoked before without notice).

I am very disappointed in the egregious actions that the ASL Board has
taken (or more importantly have directed others to take) with regards to
the AllStarLink infrastructure and their statement.  Such actions are
clearly indicative of a group that is unfit to be the stewards to the
legacy of the late Jim Dixon or properly be of service to the community
without trying to benefit from it.  Additionally, I feel that these
actions, as made clear in their statement, were directed at me in an
attempt to "punish" me for my insistence and diligence at keeping the
ASL (now PTTLInk) infrastructure running when others made disruptive
changes to it.  If so, then this is very troubling indeed.

As I have very plainly stated before to the ASL Board members and
others, as long as I have the resources to support ASL they will remain
available.  In that I will pledge to my fellow hams that PTTLink will
remain operational and available for use as long as I am able to
continue to provide the time and other resources to keeping it
operational.  Fortunately, I am no longer alone in this endeavor and
others have volunteered to help.

The new links for PTTLInk sites are as follows:

PTTLink Portal - https://www.pttlink.org

PTTLink Stats Server - http://stats.pttlink.org

PTTLink Registration Server - register.pttlink.org

PTTLink Node List Server - nodes(x).pttlink.org

PTTLInk is on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/pttlink


Additionally, you can use the DNS node lookup developed by W9CR (which
was working with allstarlink.org before the ASL Board forked the network):

IP Address of registered node: dig <node#>.nodes.pttlink.org

TXT record showing DNS registration info: dig TXT <node#>.nodes.pttlink.org

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73,
Stacy
KG7QIN