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		Updated: 28 October 2001 New Fast Chebucto Hard Drive Chebucto Technical Committee volunteers worked through the night Saturday installing and configuring a fast new hard drive for the Chebucto Community Net. The new hard drive, a Seagate Cheetah 36.9 GB SCSI drive, will offer much faster information writing and retrieval than the other hard drives on Chebucto. The time consuming and laborious configuration of the new drive and transfer of files from older, slower drives went well, and Chebucto web pages are being served noticeably faster than before. The Technical Committee plans to move the most frequently accessed files on Chebucto to the new drive. With the basic drive configuration complete, further transfers of files from the various drive partitions yet to be copied over should be possible without having to shut down the system completely. Chebucto users had been seeing occasional hard drive error messages from a defective older drive. This problem has now been fixed with the addition of the new drive. Word on the Street big hit! Attendance records for the Word on the Street literary festival were broken on a sunny September Sunday as an estimated 45,000 people showed up to Pier 20. Chebucto was there in force. More on the story here! The Chebucto Community Net booth was well attended although a plan to run a live video feed from the site fell through at the last minute due to connectivity problems. New Membership Reward Plan! Chebucto is pleased to announce a new Membership Reward Plan open to all current Chebucto members. Full Details here. For each new Sustaining or Family Sustaining member who tells us they were referred to us by you, we'll give you a $20 credit good towards your next Sustaining or Family Sustaining membership. "Word of mouth" advertising can now get you free internet: five referrals are good for a free Sustaining membership, including a year of our famous Chebucto Plus full graphical access. *Chebucto Users tops in .NS.CA SETI processing SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, has been processing their radio telescope data with home users' computers for years now. Using an innovative screensaver which runs whenever the user computer is not in use, SETI has had 740,000 years of high quality computer processor time donated to it. Of all the computer domains ending in the letters NS.CA, denoting Nova Scotia, chebucto.ns.ca now ranks number one, beating out both the government of Nova Scotia and the vast resources of EdNet, the schools network. Current stats here. Chebucto users have sent in more than 8400 results, representing more than 20 years of CPU time that would otherwise have been wasted. Virus filtering successful Mail filters designed to trap the W32/SirCam and Hybris worms have proven to be effective. The filters, which check for particular patterns within the virus structure, trapped more than 1000 virus-laden emails within their first 48 hours of operation. While there are no current plans to add more viruses to the filter, the filter design allows for it. Chebucto's filtering of these particular viruses should not be considered a substitute for users protecting themselves with good anti-virus software kept up-to-date with current virus patterns. Email viruses hit Chebucto users Email viruses continue to cause trouble for Chebucto text and Chebucto Plus users. Windows 2000 and Windows NT users are vulnerable to the Nimda, Code Red and Code Red II worms. There is more information including software patches that protect these users from these worms here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/security/virus/virus.asp As mentioned in the news item above, Chebucto now filters for the W32/ SirCam and Hybris worms. There have been some reports of user infection with other viruses, notably the Magistr worm. The Chebucto Community Net strongly recommends that all Chebucto Plus users have anti-virus software and that they keep their virus definitions updated frequently, no less than once a month. An excellent source of information is Chebucto UserHelp Team Leader Norman De Forest's Anti-Virus page, which includes links to more information and help in fixing an infected computer: http://chebucto.ca/~af380/antivirus.html Outlook user email advisory After the recent wave of viruses specifically targetting users of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express email programs, and the constant stream of user complaints about randomly altered program settings and difficulty using the program, the Chebucto Community Net Office and the Chebucto Technical Committee recommend our users do not use either Outlook or Outlook Express as their email program. Windows Users can find a selection of email programs available for download here and Macintosh users can find a selection of email programs here. New Chebucto By-Laws now in effect The new Chebucto Community Net Society By-Laws approved by Special Resolution at this year's AGM have been approved by the Provincial government and are now in effect. The new By-Laws can be found here and through the Chebucto text service by using the g)o bylaws shortcut (when in Lynx, type gbylaws then hit Enter or Return). Chebucto gets a new domain name! Chebucto has acquired the new domain name chebucto.ca. This new name can be used for web page addresses on Chebucto as well as email addresses on Chebucto. The existing domain name chebucto.ns.ca will still work for both web page addresses and email addresses and there is no plan to discontinue it. Users are advised to only use chebucto.ns.ca to subscribe to mailing lists due to the configuration of outgoing mail from Chebucto. Go to the Beacon** Go to the Services page