@HuskerlandBob Sez: We are back (mostly) with most of our remaining data migrated back to our computer server. Here in a bit we will fire things up again, starting with feature stories on our 2019 Huskerland football players of the year but before we do I thought I would share with you this, my column from this week's Central City newspaper. It deals with our local newspaper, which Penni and I have published since 1989, as well as Huskerland. Figured it would give you some perspective on where we are and how we got there.

And BTW, as this is written early Friday morning we still can't mail our Wednesday newspaper because of problems with our server.

* Forget Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neill. this is no Love Story. Far from it. Though it is quite a tale.

As this is written it is not mid-Wednesday morning, my time for writing my weekly column for the past 30 years, it is early Thursday morning. And this week’s paper isn’t finished yet. Let me tell you why...

Tuesday morning our office computer server was hacked. The attack fried our server and two of our computers. At the same time the switch box for our Wi-Fi was also disabled, and our office laptop was on the DL due to a stalled system update, leaving us with no way to even post to the Web. With our server disabled your local newspaper, which is usually published and mailed on Wednesdays, was stymied. As this is written our new server has been installed but our saved data has yet to be fully migrated; we hope (pray) to be in position to finish today’s paper by later today (Thursday) with hopes of mailing the thing first thing Friday.

If you are a subscriber to the print edition of The Republican-Nonpareil you will be able to access the entire paper as soon as we have it completed, again, think mid-morning on Friday, though it may be a skosh later.

BTW, we are also supposed to publish next week’s Republican-Nonpareil on Monday, due to the holiday. You can do that math, it doesn’t work out so good for our small (five people) office staff. Gonna be a long weekend for my people, who are working on your behalf.

* How does all this happen? I am not expert in this field but basically our office received an email with a virus attached to it; according to our techs the email was almost certainly from a source familiar to our office, and that source almost certainly didn’t know the virus was attached to the email. (So knowing that, I had to ask, did our techs send us the email in order to drum up some extra holiday business? They assured me that wasn’t the case. I assured them I was kidding. Mostly.)

One of the more frustrating parts to this entire scenario is the fact our new server was to be installed shortly after the first of the year. Our techs had put us on the back burner, stringing the whole process out a lot longer than we wanted. I mean, what are the odds something could go wrong? Would a new server prevented the hack? Maybe not, but maybe. Either way we will deal with that later, for right now we are scrambling to get this week’s paper completed.

And next week’s.

* On a related note that doesn’t impact you as an R-N reader the hack also cost me dearly on a different publishing front.

In an effort to take the strain off our aging server I had been using an external hard drive to store some of my past Huskerland Prep Report photos. You know, trying to play ball. As a result of the hack I have lost the last five years worth of Huskerland photos, including almost all the game photos, all the sized photos for our Rivals.com website and printed editions, including our presason football magazines.

That’s a lot of irreplaceable history down the drain, including photos I had hoped to use over the winter months and into the months of 2020 preseason football coverage.

* This might seem a bit harsh but I compare our tech’s willingness to “move us to the front of the line” after our server failed to the state roads department’s sudden willingness to put up a flashing yellow caution light over an intersection where somebody has been killed in an accident. Nice gesture, just too late.

* Addendum: We were able to save some of the 2019 Huskerland photos, including the sized photos which appear on the website. Part of the reason I couldn't post anything sooner than now was the fact the website's admin doesn't allow stories to be posted without a photo, and I didn't have access to what photos we have remaining until this morning at 6:30 a.m. Regardless, like the late, great Casey Kasem was fond of saying on his American Top 40 radio show, "now back to the countdown."