The total failure of a 2-year-old hard drive on Chebucto Community Net's main server early Saturday morning (June 21) has resulted in some continuing service disruptions to Chebucto users. A new hard drive was purchased and installed by early Saturday afternoon, but its configuration and the restoration of the nightly tape backups to it took much longer than anybody had anticipated. The new hard drive is reported to be much slower then the old drive, which is being replaced under warranty. Technical Committee volunteers worked through the weekend and are continuing to work on restoring Chebucto services.

At this time there are reports of several text account services being down including some text account file management tools, Zmodem uploads and downloads, and there are reports of difficulty logging into text accounts.

Graphical account users have reported difficulty logging into their mail with home computer mail programs. Outlook Express users in particular have reported timing out while trying to download their mail. These delays in logging in to get mail should resolve when the backlog of mail has been delivered. In the meantime, mail can be accessed using the Chebucto webmail, http://chebucto.ca

No user email was lost in the hard drive crash though some mail was bounced back to the sender when it could not be delivered in time. All new incoming mail to Chebucto is being delivered now. Priority is being given to new arriving mail with the backlog of mail being delivered as fast as our system will allow. As of 8 am Wednesday morning (June 25), there are approximately 8,000 messages in the mail queue and it is anticipated that these should be delivered by Wednesday afternoon.

Chebucto Newspaper Column Give-aways!

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

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

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

Windows Users can find a selection of email programs available for download here and Macintosh users can find a selection of email programs here.

Go to the Services page