Ron Shannon

[Garry]

My friend Ron Shannon passed away April 27, 2020 after an extended period of illness. He built and flew a beautiful Rebel, which I referred to as a show plane when compared to my bush plane. We met when I offered a seat to the community for the Rebel Ramble to Osh in 2007. Ron grabbed it and we became great friends. Ron's beautiful build site became a problem a few years back and while I have the data available, to date neither Ron or I have been able to open it up and rebuild the site yet.

[Flygirl]

So sorry for the loss of your friend Ron. Osh 2007 was where I met Ron and you many years ago and yes, Ron's build page was a great resource while we were building our plane. Ron's detailed input will be missed.

[WWhunter]

Garry,

So sorry to hear abut Ron's passing. Ihave been wondering how he was doing. Last I emailed him, he wasn't himself and I could only offer him best wishes.

Keith

[tjhickey]

Ron was one of the most unique individuals I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. I only saw him face to face once, at Oshkosh, but we traded emails back and forth, and I had deep admiration for his knowledge and skills. I too, had been wondering how he was doing, as over the past two years our exchanges had tapered off. My condolences to his family and friends.

Tim Hickey

[Coastflyer]

Sorry to hear this. I visited Ron at his place in Sequim. Nice guy

[schaumr]

I echo the sentiments here...Ron was a great person, and his website was indeed a huge resource (at least for me).

Garry....what would it take to bring his website data back online? Money? time? expertise?...all three?

Rob

[Garry]

Rob,

The website was a Drupal 6 website, and as best I can tell, Ron lost his ability to access the database (mysql I think) for unknown reasons. I think he hosted this himself at home and probably had some local hosting issue. Not sure. This misadventure occurred after brain surgery and Ron was never able to handle it again. I am familiar but certainly no expert in Drupal 7, but I've never touched Drupal 6. It's also been about 20 years since my last work on database stuff which was postgresql, a system similar to but not identical to mysql. If we could muster the manpower with those experiences we could likely do a resurrection. Otherwise, it will wait until this old one gets around to it, and I'm not getting any younger or more capable. Finally someone would have to sponsor the website and take care of it. So all of the above with limited assurance of success. Is there anyone in our group with the skills? We do keep losing these build sites for similar reasons over the years. Not sure what we can do about it.

Garry

[schaumr]

Thanks for the explanation Garry,

Mike Fairbanks (the owner/administrator of this site) has offered to host builders' logs here, so perhaps we could capitalize on that?

[mikefairbanks]

I actually hosted Ron's site years ago, and the directory is still setup on the server... however it is empty. I also checked the mysql databases, and there are none related to his site, so don't believe he ever had the Drupal site setup on my system.

If you can tell me what release of Drupal 6 it was, I'd be happy to set it up for you. There were 4 beta releases, 4 RC releases, and then the official release 6.0 followed by 38 maintenance releases through 6.38. It is important to get the same release if I am going to be able to drop a copy of his database in place and have it work. It might be possible to put the last release on, drop his database in, then run the update script... but I'd just have to try it and see if it works.

[Garry]

Mike,
I will dig into it and try to answer those questions. You and I should probably have a chat about all that and earlier circumstances. Please PM me with a phone number.

[snowyriver]

Ron will be missed. His web site and input on this forum were helpful and appreciated. I know I got a lot from it during my build.

[Garry]

Mike,

Please PM me so I can send back the dbase, and other related data privately. I had forgotten I had opened the sql file successfully in 2017 and stopped there. I don't seem to find anything in my records about the Drupal 6 config. The sql file is 15 Mb so I suspect I can just email it to you.

[irishfield]

Sorry to hear of Ron's passing! Ron was a friend of mine on Fakebook until he went far right on me and I got tired of the BS. If I'd known what he was up against I'd have understood, considering our Daughter that lived a similar path in the end.

Sorry for the loss Garry, but I do have to say that there is no need to revive that website that nobody used. It is what it is and builders have all they need here, as long as Mike keeps this site going.

[Flygirl]

but I do have to say that there is no need to revive that website that nobody used. It is what it is and builders have all they need here, as long as Mike keeps this site going.

Speak for yourself Wayne, maybe you didn't use it; but it was a useful resource for us while building.

Garry, if you get Ron's up and running I'm sure there are builders that would appreciate it. If not, it was a good resource at the time when we built our plane. Thanks.

[schaumr]

I echo flygirl's comments...This builders forum has lots of good information, but Ron's website was well documented (text and photos) and obviously in chronological order, so I see it as a complimentary resource to this one.