O.K. I give up.

[Nella F.]

I realize there are many of you who have issues/conflicts/baggage with frn. I don't. I just like the excitement of that occasional "catch" for the first time of a Pirate, or a s.w. station that I shouldn't be able to catch....we know what I mean. What's goin' on at frn? If one of you know and can give a factual answer I will surely enjoy all the rest of the postings...if I get the joke or not. (yes, I'm very "Bored Now"! Did anyone elses fantasy get distroyed when a.h. got preggers?)

[Fansome]

The FRN server, oddly enough, is physically located in Joplin MO, and the site is registered to John Cruzan, who founded it and supported it for years. He and Kirk Trummel set up the site originally as a dial-in BBS in the 90s, and later converted it to a web site in 1998 or so. Both were active pirates, up until they got a visit from the FCC in the late 90s.

However, Kirk died, and Cruzan went on to bigger and better things. In the early part of the last decade Cruzan gave control of the site to the group that now runs the new Google Free Radio North America group; however, the new crowd does not have physical access to the server, and Cruzan kept control of the domain name. This means that, if anything happens to the site that can't be fixed remotely, Cruzan must take care of the situation. This has caused outages in the past, due to things such as the domain name expiring. Last spring a huge tornado went through Joplin; the server was not directly affected, but, again, the FRN was cut off from the net for an extended period until Cruzan took care of it.

I do not know for sure what the current problem is; the FRN software is ancient and apparently extremely fragile, so perhaps it exceeded some limit, or maybe became corrupted somehow. There may be a hardware issue, or perhaps the hosting site changed in such a way that the software couldn't deal with it. In any event, it is up to Cruzan to fix the problem, and until then the FRN will probably stay down.

Something like this happened a number of years ago, and Cruzan told people that the FRN was not worth the trouble it took to maintain it, and he was going to let it go. Apparently, though, he got enough of an outcry from the membership that he went ahead and fixed the problem, but for a while there it looked like the FRN was history. The handwriting was on the wall, however, as it became clear that the site was probably going to go down at some point, irreparably, if Cruzan could not or would not fix it again. That time may be now.

[ETM71]

I miss the FRN. I don't miss the BS that grew all over it like a damn fungus. 

[Jolly Roger]

Unfortunately I only signed on to the FRN site AFTER the stink of wet fur had started to spread. The info I provided on sign up was either received by or passed on to the Furreh bunch who used it to try intimidate me. When I threatened legal action I received a reply from the Grand Exalted Floppy Eared one himself in minutes. The only way he would have known so quickly would be if he was the one in control of the site or if whoever had control of the site was in direct, immediate contact with him. When I asked to be removed from the site and any knowledge or info about me erased (which they agreed to do) I STILL received junk, harrassing  emails from them about someone else. So do I miss the FRN? Uh, no. Do I sound like a broken record constantly going on about the Furreh Bunch? You bet. And my record starts up everytime someone looks at me with rose colored glasses about the good old days of the FRN. I never saw them. The A*C*E. That's what I miss. The good old days of the early '80's when I used to be on the cover.

[UNID QRP]

I do not know for sure what the current problem is; the FRN software is ancient and apparently extremely fragile, so perhaps it exceeded some limit, or maybe became corrupted somehow. There may be a hardware issue, or perhaps the hosting site changed in such a way that the software couldn't deal with it. In any event, it is up to Cruzan to fix the problem, and until then the FRN will probably stay down.

My guess is that it's meant to stay down, at least for now.  Querying the DNS servers that whois info says are handling the frn.net domain (ns1.joplinglobe.com and ns4.teklinks.com) returns nothing other than the results for those same DNS servers.  There are no entries for www.frn.net or anything else, so there's no way (short of directly entering an IP address into a browser, etc.) to get to the server that the FRN was hosted on.

This is why it seems like it's meant to be gone: people generally don't yank DNS records for a domain unless there's a good reason for it.  Maybe it'll return, maybe it won't.  Personally, I'd like to see it come back - just without the unpleasant culture it seemed to spawn over the past few years.

[UNID QRP]

Hm, looks like things have changed a bit in the last 24 hours or so.  The site appears to be back up, and its nameservers have changed to ns23.worldnic.com and ns24.worldnic.com.

Their DNS is still kinda screwy, though.  Depending on how your query is handled, it could potentially resolve to either 208.91.197.27 (the current FRN site) or 69.38.106.211 (which happens to be the IP address for www.joplinglobe.com).  Basically, it looks as though there are two A records for www.frn.net in the frn.net zone when (I'm guessing) one is meant to be a CNAME.

[Fansome]

Sheesh; it's back up, yet again. They should have just let it rest in peace.

You know what they say: The FRN never really dies; it just smells that way.

[ChrisSmolinski]

"HFU: The most-viewed, reliable, blazingly fast, respected, and loved Pirate Radio site on the Net"

You should put that on a t-shirt, Al.

[ETM71]

The FRN never really dies; it just smells that way.

LOL, I still love the FRN but that's too funny.

[John Poet]

I was beginning to despair....

Without the on-running puppet show which is the FRN, what would there be to ridicule?
(beyond the now mostly-irrelevent semi-private cult rantings of his hare-ness?)

Murphy, Fran & Ollie is sure to keep us entertained.. almost like a good train wreck would do.

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