The Chebucto Community Net will be going all out for this year's Word On The Street literacy fair, to be held on Spring Garden Road in Halifax Sunday September 26 1999. CCN will have its own tent this year, in the DalTech parking lot across from the Spring Garden Road Public Library. There will be onsite account activations and renewals, information displays and more. Mark this on your calendar and drop on down!

         The Chebucto Community has been under email attack this past week from a number of open relay mail servers in Argentina. The attack, which consisted of thousands of attempts to subscribe to CCN mailing lists in a crude attempt to spam those lists and to gain access to list addresses, is being beaten back by CCN-Tech volunteers.

         Spamming is the unsolicited sending of email advertisements and is one of the internet's major problems. Open relay mail servers are mail servers which indiscriminately forward any mail coming into them as if it came from themselves. Taking advantage of such servers to mask their own origins is a favorite spammer trick.

         The CCN-Tech team is adding another six phone lines to the Chebucto Plus graphical based service this week.

         The new lines will be administered by the second PortMaster terminal server purchased last month and will bring the total number of Plus lines to 26.

         The Board of Directors of the Chebucto Community Net Society will be meeting 6:30 pm Tuesday, 21 September 1999 at the North Branch Library, 2285 Gottingen St.

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

         The failure of the air conditioning tower in the machine room containing the Chebucto Net machines caused a loss of service Friday August 20. The machine room is set up so that a temperature rise will cause all machines to immediately power down. The text-based CCN service, Chebucto Plus graphical service, and the Dalhousie Math Department computers were all down from 12:15 am until around 1 pm while repairs were made to the cooling tower.

         The tower is being replaced by Dalhousie but this may take up to four weeks and further breakdowns in this time are still possible.

         The CCN-Tech team is pleased to announce that quota levels for all new and renewing Full and Family membership accounts will get even more disk space than before: 1500 k of file space quota and 1500 k of mail quota.

         This increase in quota is being slowly phased in as current Full members renew and new Full members are added so as to not cause any disk overloads.

         Work on the new Provincial Server, designed to provide email and web services to communities in outlying regions of the province, continues as finishing touches are put to the various programs and scripts running on Athena, the newest machine in the Chebucto family.

         The Provincial Server, with work still in progress on its website at http://www.nsaccess.ns.ca will be tested by various Community Access Program sites around the province before it becomes fully operational later this summer. It's designed to offer email and web space to communities across Nova Scotia currently without such public services locally available.

         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. It is planned to stop delivery of mail to these old addresses by November 1, 1999 and mail currently going to these addresses is receiving notice to this effect.

         Work continues on the purging of all references to these outdated addresses from CCN files and documents including User Profiles. Some Chebucto users may experience slow logins when 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. Users are urged to remove any references to the old domain names and may choose to automate this process if they wish.