Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

PCFA.ORG Reaches Goal; Back On-Line

Senator Mike Ross (center) presents Prescott Community Freenet Association with a check for $5,000 from the Governor's Emergency Fund Sunday. Receiving the check are Eddie Daniel (left) and Danny Stewart. Ross telephone Gov. Jim Guy Tucker after the April 1 fire at Prescott High School to request the funds. Ross said Tucker was "excited about what PCFA is doing with Wolf Den in providing free internet access to people of the area, providing information to the internet about Prescott and Nevada County, and the way it promotes growth and harmony in the community." "This recognizes the kind of work Prescott Community Freenet Association is doing and I encourage evryone to support the PCFA.ORG project," Ross said.

The PCFA.ORG computer project of the Prescott Community Freenet Association (PCFA) is back on-line, now that the $10,000 goal has been reached.

"The public has been extremely supportive of our effort," Charles Ray Cross, PCFA chairman, said. "Even the people who don't know how to use a computer understand how the PCFA.ORG project is beneficial to the community.

"We appreciate the donations which let us know we could get PCFA.ORG up and running again," he continued. "After the first $5,000 was contributed, we dipped into our operating funds to pay for the new computer. Now, we can get back to the work of providing local computer users with internet access to the world and providing the world with access to the Prescott and Nevada County area."

"Even though we've raised the money to pay for the hardware, the cost of the local telephone lines continues month after month," Eddie Daniel, vice-chairman, said. "We still need the regular donations from organizations and contributions from users."

World Wide Web users can point their browsers to "http://www.pcfa.org/" for PCFA.ORG's home page.

The Prescott Schools, along with the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN), provide the internet connection for PCFA.ORG. PCFA raises the money to pay for the local telephone lines which give residents on the 887 exchange access to the internet without long distance telephone charges.

The new PCFA.ORG computer was put into service on Monday, April 15, exactly two weeks after the fire at the Prescott High School building. Two days later, the out-bound network connection was restored. On Monday, April 22, the internet name servers were updated to let the rest of the world find PCFA.ORG once again.

The new computer started exactly at the point the old computer was at when it properly shut down at 10:32 on Monday, April 1, five minutes after the power failed. The fire-resistant vault at the Prescott High School building limited the damage to smoke and soot deposits.

System administrator Danny Stewart said, "We could have been back a little sooner, but since so many people depend upon PCFA.ORG, PCFA decided to replace the machine with a new unit, rather than suffer from intermittent failures caused by corrosion. The Pentium 166 with a two gigabyte hard drive and 32 megabytes of RAM is worth the wait."

Here is some technical information for PCFA.ORG users: the revised IP, gateway, DNS nameserver, and time server numbers are 170.211.23.142 and 255.255.255.240 is the new netmask. Users may need to press "Escape" at the "SLIP ENABLED" prompt, or better yet, switch to the "Internal PPP" connection.

The telephone number, 887-1842, remains the same.

Users may need to re-subscribe to mailing lists. Any updates or changes are posted during login, so if there are problems, use a terminal program and read the messages.

Persons who do not yet have an account may log in as "new" and get an account application, or send a self-addressed and stamped envelope to PCFA, 615 Oak Street, Prescott.