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Updated: 23 June 2003

Message Of The Day

Chebucto News Archive

Major disruption hits Chebucto

The total failure of a 2-year-old hard drive on Chebucto Community Net's main server early Saturday morning (June 21) resulted in two days of service disruptions to Chebucto users. A new hard drive was purchased and installed by early Saturday afternoon, but the configuration of the new hard drive and restoring the contents of the nightly tape backups to it took much longer than anybody had anticipated. Technical Committee volunteers worked all weekend and continued to work into Monday morning on restoring Chebucto services.

No user email was lost in the hard drive crash and all new incoming mail to Chebucto is being delivered now. There were 29,000 email messages queued for delivery at 8 am Monday June 23 with another 45,000 waiting on the backup mail server. Incoming and outgoing mail is being delayed as the mail system works through this backlog of mail. Chebucto Plus dialup services were not affected by this disk crash and continued uninterrupted all weekend. Chebucto website services were restored by 9 pm Sunday night.

Chebucto Newspaper Column Give-aways!

Chebucto's Mousepad newspaper column, written by Chebucto Internal Committee Chair Mark Alberstat with occasional help from some fellow Chebucto volunteers, is being well received and a third free mousepad for a column idea has been sent out. The column is published every second week in the Sunday Chronicle Herald. The Mousepad focuses on computers and internet technologies and how they can be used by people for an almost infinite variety of purposes. People can write in questions to the column and if they are used they will get a cool new Chebucto Community Net mousepad. Email questions to the Mousepad at mousepad@chebucto.ns.ca

Chebucto mousepads may be purchased from the Chebucto Office for $10 each or mailed out for $15 each. Contact office@chebucto.ns.ca to order.

Alert: Fake Windows updates

We wish to advise our users to beware of email messages claiming to be from Microsoft containing supposed Windows Updates. These messages are fake and the included web address or program is a virus. Microsoft does not email users about Windows Updates.

Chebucto advises all users of the Windows Operating System to keep updated with the latest security updates from Microsoft. There are major security holes in the Microsoft Windows Operating System, Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and Microsoft's Outlook Express email program which can be fixed with software patches from Microsoft's authentic Windows Update site.

Unpatched versions of these Microsoft products are vulnerable to many viruses, worms, trojan programs and exploits where hostile users can get access to your computer and files. Users are advised to keep current with Service Packs and Critical Updates for Microsoft products.

**Chebucto Users still 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 more than 1,507,000 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, producing more than double the results of both the government of Nova Scotia and the vast resources of EdNet, the schools network combined. Current stats here. Chebucto users have sent in more than 21,000 results, representing more than 43 years of CPU time that would otherwise have been wasted.

SETI is about to enter a new phase, targetting the top 200 candidate signals for direct observation using the full resources of the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

Outlook user email advisory

After the continuing 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.

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