The Washington Search and Rescue Resources Web Site came about while I was working as the Network Manager for the Washington National Guard at Camp Murray, Washington in the mid 1990's.  For some reason I needed to find a search and rescue unit and I found that there weren't to many good resources available at the time other than calling around or browsing through search engines on the Internet.  As a result of my personal frustration in finding contacts for various organizations I got the idea of hosting my own web site.

Since this was a personal project I couldn't use the servers and network connections at work so I started doing some research to see what was available for a person with a compulsion to build a web site in their home.  After checking around I found that the only reasonable high speed connection available would be a dedicated ISDN line.  It gave me the capability of 128KB/second Internet connectivity at a price that I could deal with.  I placed the order and got in the queue with US West for a hookup.

I built a 486 server from parts I bought at a local computer store and loaded up the server with Window NT Server and the Internet Information Services.  I got myself a copy of Microsoft FrontPage and within a few hours the site was born.  When US West installed the ISDN line I contacted my provider and got things up and running.  I took a few days to get all the bugs worked out but within a week things were working fine.  I had them set up a domain name for me at WWW.SAR.WA.NET and within a few days I had my first hits.

I continued along adding links as I found them and dressing up the site periodically.  One day I had a meeting with the folks at the Emergency Management Division (home of the State SAR Coordinator) and found out that they had a Webmaster of their own.  After a short discussion I told them they should take over the site and after they copied my page and its links I just forwarded everything to them. Within a few months it became apparent that they had neither the time or inclination to keep the site up to date so I turned off the forward and put my site back online.

Since that time I've updated things a little bit.  Its now running on a resonably up-to-date Linux system and I have a 2.8MB connection using Tacoma's fiberoptic  Click!Network ^TM .  I've also converted everything to PHP pages and the data is pulled from a MySQL database that is maintained by unit contacts and myself.  In January of 1999 I shelled out the $75.00 to register the WA-SAR.NET domain I currently use. 

I'm currently employed by the Federal Aviation Administration as the Manager for the Western Information Technology Service Area (This includes: Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and Samoa) Headquartered in Renton, Washington.

Paul Fison
WA-SAR Webmaster