For those who are wondering about the outage on Friday, August 3, this site is hosted in Rochester, Minnesota where I rent space on a server. The reason for the outage, I have been told, is the "Red Worm" which is currently attacking servers on the internet. Although this site does not use Microsoft software, and is, thus, immune to the red worm, it has been attacking other servers on the network that did not apply the Microsoft supplied patch and, thus, the outage.
I find it ironic that ZDNet (Ziff-Davis Publishing--much computer stuff) reported yesterday that the Red Worm was pretty much a bust--hadn't done any damage. Last night they went out and are still out this morning.
There are a lot of sites that slowed down over the last couple of days, including e-mail. Something is wrong, folks. It got somebody. It got us.
The moral of the story: Make sure you have a good antivirus program on your computer, and keep it up to date and hope that the boys on the nework operating the servers do the same.
Leonard Neumann