CCN News!
Updated: 4 February 2000
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CCN-Tech Adds 10 Plus lines
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.
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Provincial community net conference held
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.
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CCN-Tech experiments with Plus SQUID
server
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.
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New hard drive installed
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.
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Next CCN Board meeting
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.
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Please submit CCN news items to:
Andrew
D. Wright, adw@chebucto.ns.ca
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