On behalf of the Rensselaer Club of New Jersey Executive Committee, welcome back to RCNJ.org as we relaunch it.

RCNJ.org has been the place to go to learn about Rensselaer Alumni Activities in the Greater New York and New Jersey area since 1997. With the help of our new web infrastructure we hope to keep it that way for years to come.

As publisher of RCNJ.org, I want to apologize for inadequate disaster recovery planning. During the first week of October, one of the Internet Service Providers that my company uses had an electrical transformer failure that knocked an entire data center off-line for almost a week. The server where RCNJ.org used to be housed was located in this data center.

In spite of the fact that our server suffered no physical damage, it took me about 60 days to put the original content from RCNJ.org back on the Internet. As you can see from the state of the home page, we're still missing almost 18 months of articles. Those articles will make it back up here eventually, but I had to start somewhere.

I've learned a lot from this experience. CTDATA now has two separate server installations in different parts of the country. We're building an automated backup mechanism that sends files from one server to the other. We should have had this before the ISP failure, but we're building it now.

Over the next few days, I'm planning to restore the RCNJ current events calendar and provide a new way for members to subscribe to an alert service that will notify you automatically when we post new information on our website. Thank you for your continued participation in the RCNJ. Feel free to post a comment on this story or email me at dave_aiello [at] ctdata.com if you want to provide any feedback.

--Dave Aiello '89