How to get access to a deceased person's account with no login credentials or power of attorney?
Hello!
I am a member of the puppy linux community but not an official of the community/developement team.
Big problem. The owner of the puppy linux forum, Mr. John de Murga, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy ( li969-200.members.linode.com ) has passed away and nobody has account login information. We found out he passed away after the forum murga-linux.com/puppy went offline and we could not contact him.
This is a tragedy for both the owner of the account and puppy linux as the forum has 15-years of unique puppy linux development that could be lost. We have been piecing together a new forum as best we can at a different site but we really need to figure out a route to recover the original PHPBB forum and get it back online. It has been offline since July 12th, 2020.
Is there any known method available to get admin access to our forum? The original plan was to get login credentials via power of attorney through the deceased spouse but that seems delayed or maybe unobtainable and we fear the account will expire and completely delete the forum.
The community/developement team is attempting to secure the login credentials via power of attorney through the spouse of Mr. de Murga but there is a real possibility we/they are running out of time to recover the forum/database. There were more than one million posts on the forum when it went offline with a maintenance message.
Thank You for any information or method you can provide to help us recover the forum or put the forum back online at Linode.com
Best Regards
- A worried puppy linux user
5 Replies
I'm so sorry to hear about Mr. de Murga's passing. There are a couple of potential ways forward from here. The first would be to send an email to support@linode.com with any information you have. We will need the last 6 digits of the payment card on file for the account in order to authenticate it, so if you are in contact with the person handling their accounts, you could ask that person to reach out to us with that information. Alternatively, if someone has access to the email address on file, you could use the Forgot Password option on the Cloud Manager login page to reset the password and log into the account that way. Feel free to reach out to us directly if you have any questions about either method.
Thank you so much for the reply and the information.
I will contact the developement team and give them the information you provided. I am hopeful we can gather the required information in a timely manner.
Thank You for the help.!
- A worried puppy linux user
Just an update to this.
A member of the developement team (Barry Kauler) has sent an email to support@linode.com and he also informed me he has received Mr. de Murga's death certificate if needed and that his contact is going to get him the required card information. I may be posting here again but hopefully everything will be able to get taken care of using email.
Again, Thank You for the help in getting us access to restore the forum.
Best Regards!
- A worried puppy linux user
SOLVED
Thank you SO MUCH for your help.
The forum has just come back on-line, this is my final post to this thread.
Best Regards!
- A no longer worried puppy linux user :)
Hey rekabr,
I'm glad to see puppy linux is alive and well.
I am in a very similar situation myself right now.
A fellow community member who created the a site, passed way..
We have the admin access to the site but not the Linode account.
Relatives of the deceased have provided a death certificate, however, the power of attorney stuff seems complicated.
Are you able to share any additional details on how Linode access was recovered?
Thank you!