Don 'Duck' Landes (AKA DFDuck), 2 Nov 1955 - 2 Nov 2022

He had so many good friends in his life, many of which I have become friends with.
Among those are: Brad Wheless, Bruce Austin, Don Cobb, David Larsen. (From the late sixties)
I believe that he became friends with those four at Analy High School in Sebastapol.
Not to forget his racing buddies: Chuck Peters and Big Wess Brown.

Duck and I crossed paths in the late eighties when I was running a BBS like he was.
Mine was a Commodore 64/128 BBS, and I owned an Amiga 2000. His was C64/128 and Amiga.
He was the author of many BBS doors for the Amiga CNET BBS software (or was it Skynet or something?).
Over the years, he authored so many computer things in different languages, far too vast to list.

I was at the time living in Las Cruces, NM, and then Denver, CO up until Mar. 1992.
Our friendship continued  on clchat IRC after I was transferred to Ft. Devens, MA.
Clchat was what the Amiga Relay Chat Network (IRC) was running on.
We both became friends with Dr. Karl Bellve, while he was attending Univ. Maryland.
Karl was running the us1 (wade1) ARCNet server on an actual Amiga running in his lab.
(That was the last Amiga running on the network, even after we migrated to ircd.)
Karl transferred us1 control to me after he graduated, and we kept it running for awhile.
(I had migrated from MA to CT in 1997) (wade1 server died twice in 1999 and 2000, when I went Linux ircd.)
In 2000 or so, I had wanted to buy Karl's A3000, but when I found out Duck wanted it, told him to go ahead.
Unfortunately the SCSI hardware bug bit Duck, and ate all his SCSI drives.
That ended his Amiga days and he ended up mostly in Linux and Windows.

Shortly after my move to Ft. Devens, Duck and I became quite active in beta testing for VaporWare software.
Vapor was a software company owned and run by a mutual friend, Oliver Wagner.
Vapor.com marketed AmIRC, AmFTP, Voyager, and others until being sold prior to Ollie's passing.
Both of our names still appear in AmIRC.  I think he wasn't active in Voyager, as I was.
Duck had a unique setup at this time.  He was living in a trailer in the mountains.
He had no electricity, so he ran a generator, which charged banks of batteries.
He would run on the IRC until his power died, when he 'blipped out'.

Duck and I continued to bond by co-writing some AmIRC AREXX scripts, like Paranoid.arexx.
Seems much of our interests were common, like both being musicians. A lot of his music is here.
He wrote a perl bot Nightmare for me to run on the ARCNet irc server.

Our friendship continued after I migrated to Connecticut in 1997.
I started migrating to RedHat Linux a short while later, and replaced the Amiga us1 with a Linux ircd.
By 2000, I was teaching Linux to Duck, which was amazing as at that time, he didn't know PC BIOS.
He wrote the first iteration of KRAB radio, which was simply password protected downloads.
A short while later, he and I got the present KRAB streaming server running online.
(Well, most of the work was his, and I provided a small bit of assistance.)
I had set him as an ARCNet Oper, but around this time, I started providing him hosting space on my server.
At one time, I hosted web space for Chuck Peters Racing and Brown's Towing out of Chico.

Then, I started working on a Linux ipchains firewall script, and later updated it to iptables.
Duck was one of few people that actually got my script to put in place and run.
(He installed it on Alex's Book server, where it protected the production server for awhile.)

During this time, I was hosting DFDuck.net and Quackhouse Radio on my KRAB Radio server.
Somewhere around 2006, he started paying for a webhost for his pages and Quackhouse.
However, he continued helping me administer my web server, as well as server root access.
Very rare was the day that we didn't chat on irc, teamspeak, ajax chat on QHR, and later on discord.
Somewhere about 2000, or possibly earlier, he was a scorer for Big Wess Brown's race car.
(I actually hosted a page for Chuck Peters' race car, Orange Crush, around then, too.)

We were involved in so many small projects over the years, that it's hard to remember them all.
I started doing Saturday night Sixpack broadcasts in 2002, or so, and that moved to Midnight Madness in 2010.
Sometime after he picked up his webhost, he started broadcasting on Quackhouse Radio.
When Quackhouse was hosted on my server, it simply played a random playlist.
When he moved Quackhouse to a hosted centovast server, he started doing live broadcasts.
Among these were The Bootlegger's Shack and Duck's House.

(His broadcast episodes are on these pages for you to listen to, or download, if you wish.)
We both started using SAM Broadcaster, but then, we quickly moved to RadioBoss for broadcasting live.)
I was doing the HappyHour episodes, which he asked if he could play them, so I sent them to QH4.
Somewhere around 2015, I started helping him admin his hosted Quackhouse Radio server.
And, he continued helping me admin my Fedora Linux server (Upgraded from RedHat in 2010.)
He was really interested in the script that I wrote in 2014 for Linux Zoneminder, security cam software.
Zoneminder saved all the motion alerts as sql events into a mysyql database, which was cumbersome to search.
My script 'stiched' all the mothion alerts into an .avi file and uploaded it to an ftp server.
He checked my code, and he was rather impressed as to how I did all that....

In recent years, we both got into drones, and running the web based chat on Quackhouse Radio.
When Flash went EOL, and the current chat didn't perform well, we both moved into Discord.
Few years back, he took a  road trip to Texas with Big Wess Brown to run in a race.
(It was a large part of his life, and if I ever manage to get access to his files, I'll post some pics.)
After I retired from Yale in 2020, I started wanting to get back into CB radio.
At that time, Duck was running a SDR (Software Defined Radio), and recently bought some CB equipment.
I would send him periodic pictures of my F150 install, as well as my base station, which we discussed.
He told me that he couldn't find a cheap 12V power supply for his CB, so I ordered him one.
I wired up a medical grade plug for it, and shipped it to him, so he could concentrate on radio and antenna purchases.
Sadly, I don't know if he ever got on the air, but do know he joined the Mud Ducks CB group his friend was in.

The last real contact I had with him was when he dropped off the internet in Sep 2021.
He had been having some smaller strokes for a few years, and just assumed it was another one.
It turned out that I was fairly correct, and he was improving when he passed away.
Those strokes were probably the end result of surgery that he had many years ago.

Hard to imagine that I could become such close friends with someone that I've never met.
Closest we came was either talking on the phone, or voice chat using Mumble or Teamspeak.
Matter of fact, I don't think any of my friends IRL are any closer than Duck and I were.
This was why I chose to create this page, offering his broadcasts and original music for download or streaming.
I'm currently trying to get access to his files, so that I may post more things. Now, there is 22GB posted.
I fully encourage people to download as much as they would like to or possibly mirror the whole site.
If people would like to mirror, or download the entire site, just contact me using the contact form.
He was so creative, I am trying to get his creations to survive forever.  The more people that help, the easier it becomes.

Sorry for my rambling.  35 years is a lot of ground to cover. Anybody on Facebook wanting entry to the Quackhouse group,
just go to:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/319387381587444 (I'll make sure to approve you.)

His life touched so many people, I am not the only one grieving his loss.  It was like losing a brother.
May Don 'Duck' Landes Rest In Peace.  He will never be forgotten, and will live forever in our hearts and memories.

8 Nov 2022
Michael J. Brenegan