The CCN-Tech team has added another 10 phone lines to the Chebucto Plus graphical based service.

         Due to the relative scarcity of 33,600 baud modems, it has been necessary to put six 28,800 baud modems, usually used only as backups, online temporarily. A 16 modem rack of 33,600 baud modems has been ordered however and should arrive within the next two weeks. There have been some intermittent line problems with two of the new lines which the Technical committee and MTT technicians are working to correct.

         The addition of these new lines brings the total number of Plus lines to 41.

         A conference hosted by the Technology and Science Secretariat in Truro on the weekend of February 4, 2000 is expected to draw representatives from community nets around the province. The gathering is meant to help identify common resources and problems of the community nets and to perhaps put together a province-wide organization.

         A delegation from Chebucto will be in attendance including several Board members. The Beacon will feature a full report on the conference next week.

         The CCN Technical committee has been running trials with a new SQUID server. Also referred to as a proxy server, it is a machine which saves local copies of popular files, making them available to the user much more quickly than is possible to do over the internet.

         Here's how it works. Suppose you were to go to the web site at http://www.altavista.com with a graphic browser. You would be downloading one small text file which comprises the actual web page and some 29 graphic files, including some banner ads. Each of these files has to come from remote servers far away over the internet, which tends to be slow. A SQUID server would keep a local copy of all these files here in Halifax and when you asked for that web page, it would send a quick request to the remote servers to check if the files the SQUID server had were the same as the ones the remote server would be sending. If the files were the same, the SQUID server would send you its copies, which would be much faster than getting them from far away. If the files on the remote server were newer, the SQUID server would go get the new copies and send them to you while saving a copy here for the next user who asked for the page. This type of service is used by virtually every internet provider as a way to speed up response times slowed by an increasingly congested internet.

         Trials are ongoing and so far have been very promising. This new service should be introduced within the next month or so if all goes well.

         A new 18 Gig SCSI hard drive was installed Saturday 11 December 1999 in the main Chebucto machine, replacing several older, slower drives which have been parcelled out to other Chebucto computers. This new drive should speed up time taken to load Chebucto hosted web pages as well as help make the system run faster.

         The Board of Directors of the Chebucto Community Net Society will next be meeting 6:30 pm Wednesday, 23 February 2000 at the Chase Building on the Dalhousie University campus.

         Members of the Chebucto Community Net and other interested parties are welcome to attend this meeting.