THANKS!
THANKS!
Sent: 7/23/96; 8:54:42 PM
From: marc@sc.edu (Marc LaFountain)
Hi, Dave. I'm writing because you and Frontier have changed my life and I thought you might wanna know. If it weren't for the two of you, I'd probably be bawling tears right now and on the phone with SoftArc tech support. Let me explain:
I have recently taken over administration of a SoftArc FirstClass BBS at the University of South Carolina. It is a resource for students, faculty, and staff to get software and tech support. Well, the Mac running the BBS crashed Friday morning. So, my trusty Norton Disk Doctor Emergency Disk and I went down to the machine to make things right.
I have used Norton Disk Doctor for years and have always loved the way it works. It presents you with a problem and offers to fix it if you press Return. It's so easy that I always performed every fix suggested by Norton Disk Doctor.
Because of this confidence in Disk Doctor, I was blazing through the fixes Friday morning, quickly hitting Return as each was offered. Then one fix, along with a list of files on the Mac's hard drive, came up. Disk Doctor said something to the effect that all of these files began with a period (.) and that Apple does not recommend this. It asked if I wanted to replace each period with a dash (-).
Well, I had barely started reading Disk Doctor's message before I reflexively hit Return. As soon as I hit the key, I knew I had made a mistake. Disk Doctor immediately changed the periods to dashes on THOUSANDS of files, all of them related to the FirstClass BBS. And, I realized to my horror, the previous admin had never backed up the BBS files.
I was hoping the FirstClass BBS software wouldn't care, but it did. The BBS would not completely boot, complaining it couldn't find files. Users weren't being recognized. I was starting to feel physically ill!
Thankfully, I have a student assistant, Matt Hooper, who is a Frontier disciple. He uses it to automate much of the work for my department's web pages. He is always rambling on about how Frontier is the best thing since sliced bread, so I thought maybe he could help me. And, as soon as I explained the situation, he said "This sounds like a problem for Frontier!," with a gleam in his eye.
He wrote a script in just a few minutes to change the dashes back to periods. Because it was done over the network, it took the Frontier script over two hours to completely execute. But, when it was over, the BBS was back as good as new. So, Matt got a free lunch from me and you are getting this email telling you how wonderful you are.
Without you, Matt, and Frontier I would have either had to start over from scratch on the BBS or manually change the names of THOUSANDS of files. Thanks for doing Frontier. Thanks for making it free. Keep up the good work!
Marc :-)
** Marc LaFountain University of South Carolina Computer Services Division Networking, Fifth Floor Columbia, S.C. 29208 Work-(803) 777-2442 Fax-(803) 777-1900 marc@sc.edu **
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