CCN Userhelp FAQ

 by
Andrew D. Wright
 CCN Userhelp Volunteer

          Here are three commonly asked questions to CCN's Userhelp, in no particular order.

 

          What is this VT100 setting?

          Back in the good old days of computers, a computer was something the size of a Volkswagen and several users at once would communicate to it with terminals - basically a keyboard and small video monitor. These terminals had little or no processing power on their own but would simply send typed-in text to the main computer and display what the computer sent back.

          One of the biggest terminal manufacturers was a company called DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, and their most successful terminal was the VT100. Most community nets support access from programs which imitate or emulate this type of terminal. When you are connecting to the Chebucto text interface, you are using a terminal emulation program. Chebucto supports eight different types of terminal: v50, vt52, vt100, vt102, vt220, vt320, xterm, and sun.

          When you log in to the text interface of Chebucto, it asks you what type of terminal you are emulating and gives its best guess as to what that might be. The majority of the time this will be a VT100, and if this is what your terminal emulation program is set to, you simply have to hit Enter to accept this. If your terminal emulation program is set to one of the other types of terminal, you type in that model and go on. This is so Chebucto sends the right type of output to your terminal emulation program. If your screen display is garbled and hitting Ctrl - l (that is, the Control key and the letter ell key at the same time) to refresh it isn't fixing the problem, then you should check that you have told Chebucto to send the right terminal type output to you. If that still doesn't help you, you can specify a line number and tell Chebucto that your particular terminal program only displays that many lines of text. For example, to specify that your VT100 terminal program can only display twenty lines of text on the screen at one time you would type in when you see the prompt:

Enter your terminal type [vt100]: vt100 20

and Chebucto will know to only make your terminal window twenty lines high. You can specify whatever number of lines your terminal program will show without messing up its display.

 

 

          How can I send email to several people without them all seeing who else it's going to?

          You want to send the same email to several people, but you don't want them all to see who else is getting the letter. There is a way to do that and it is called BCC for Blind Carbon Copy. What you do is go into your mail and start writing a letter as usual with the 'c' for Compose command. You'll see the usual menu come up: 

To      :
Cc      :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----

          Now, hit Ctrl-r (that is, the Control key and the letter 'r' at the same time). You'll now see this: 

To      :
Cc      :
Bcc     :
Newsgrps:
Fcc     : sent-mail
Lcc     :
Attchmnt:
Subject :
----- Message Text -----

          So what you do is put your own address in the To: field, so the email is getting sent to yourself. You then put the addresses of the people you want to send the letter to in the Bcc: field and separate each one with a comma. You can put up to 49 addresses there. If you want to send the letter to more people than that you can use the Lcc: (List Carbon Copy) field. When someone receives the letter, all they see is that the letter is from you and to you and they cannot see who else received it.

          There are very few occasions when you will legitimately be sending the same email to this many people. Please remember the Chebucto User Agreement.

 

 

          How can I tell when my membership is due?

          As it happens, this is one of the more overlooked "g)o" commands already set up on CCN. When logged into your own account on Chebucto, type in:

g status

and hit Enter. You'll see a screen telling you when your membership expires. If you follow the link marked Current Account Record, you'll see all the details of your membership including the mailing address and phone number we have for you and the membership level you have. If your address has changed, you can send an email to office@chebucto.ns.ca with the current address and it will be corrected for you.

 

You may direct comments or suggestions about this column to:

Andrew D. Wright,  au141@chebucto.ns.ca

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