The Chebucto Community Net Society Annual General Meeting has been set for Tuesday, April 13th 1999 at 7:00 pm at the Halifax North Branch Library, 2285 Gottingen St.

         This meeting is open to all Chebucto Community Net Society members and is an opportunity to let us know what is on your mind as well as to elect CCN Board members and see what is going on. There will be a demonstration of the Chebucto Plus graphical service running from 6:30 to 7:00 pm.

         Anyone wishing to become a Board member is invited to contact Michael Colborne (af180@chebucto.ns.ca) of the Nominating Committee.

         The CCN Board has begun interviews for an Executive Director, a new, full-time position responsible for coordinating the development, management, administration, and representation of Chebucto.

         Due to limited resources the full time Office Manager position was eliminated and long time employee Blaine Murphy was laid off. Office hours are now 1 PM - 4 PM Monday to Friday in Room 125 in the Chase Mathematics Building on the Dalhousie University campus. Messages to the office telephone 494-2449 may be left on the voice mail system and will be responded to as necessary.

         Chebucto users are invited to use the online help resources. Users with email access requiring assistance should send email to userhelp@chebucto.ns.ca detailing their problem. Chebucto Plus users requiring assistance not covered in the online help documentation at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/PPP/Help can send email to ppp-help@chebucto.ns.ca.

         Investigations by the volunteer CCN Technical Committee into the continuing high system loads on CCN are continuing. The main suspect is a process which administers system resources to dial-up users as they login. They are attempting to recreate the problem on the old CCN machine by simulating repeated logins to it.

         Another contributing factor has been the ZMailer mail delivery program's sometimes compulsive behavior attempting to deliver undeliverable mail. Most often caused by users whose inboxes have been shut down due to their exceeding their quotas, the mail program has sometimes tried to send each email thousands of times to the same inaccessible user. It has been necessary for CCN-Tech volunteers to manually reset this several times and an upgraded version of ZMailer is being set up to help eliminate this problem.

         High system loads can have many effects upon a user's session: retrieving web pages can be slowed, data searches and email sessions can stall and a user may be logged out by the system when the session time is up without receiving the 5 minute warning usually sent by the system.

         The Chebucto Community Net's new graphical PPP service, Chebucto Plus, continues its phase in with groups of current members being contacted by email. They were offered the opportunity to upgrade their membership to the Sustaining Member level required for Chebucto Plus, with the unused balance of their current memberships counting towards the new membership level. A Sustaining Membership is $100 per year. The volunteer Chebucto Plus team wants to build the service slowly to ensure everything runs smoothly for users and will be offering it to more users as our resources allow. Members will continue to be contacted by email when they can be accommodated.

         Details on Chebucto Plus, including system requirements can be found at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/PPP (note upper case) and information on available help and support for Chebucto Plus can be found at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/PPP/Help/support.htm. You can read the original news release about Chebucto Plus here.

         The old CCN domain names ccn·cs·dal·ca and cfn·cs·dal·ca are being officially retired at the request of our upstream service provider, the Network Operations Centre at Dalhousie University. All links and bookmarks to pages and addresses on CCN using these names will soon no longer work. Changing these links and addresses to chebucto.ns.ca now will ensure trouble-free continuing access to them.

         Work continues on the purging of all references to these outdated addresses from CCN files and documents including User Profiles. Some Chebucto users may be experiencing slower logins as their file directories, addressbooks and web pages are checked for the now outdated domain names when they login. The search is a one time event though users did have to go through the process a second time after the holidays when a log file was accidentally deleted. Users are urged to remove any references to the old domain names and may choose to automate this process if they wish.