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Old Chebucto News Home >> Beacon >> Chebucto News >> Old Chebucto News Serving Your Community's Online Needs Since 1994. |
Updated: 26 June 2003
More than 100,000 email messages to Chebucto users that had been delayed
due to a weekend service disruption have now been delivered. The huge
volume of mail has been causing slow service as the mail server has been
pushed to its limit. Chebucto Technical Committee members have been
working hard, sometimes around the clock, to speed up mail delivery. They
had set priority to newer messages while setting older mail to be
processed as fast as the system would allow and have been manually sorting
through the mail queue to remove large numbers of duplicate spam messages
and the message bounces from mis-addressed spam. The Chebucto mail server
has also been physically reconfigured to enable it to work at its peak
efficiency.
The problem started on Saturday morning, June 21, with the total failure
of a key hard drive on Chebucto's main server, which caused all Chebucto
services except for the Chebucto Plus
dialup service to go down. The two year old hard drive, still under its
original warranty, was replaced with a newer hard drive by early Saturday
afternoon but restoring the data to it from the nightly tape backups took
another twenty four hours. In the meantime, mail to Chebucto users and
mailing lists continued to build up.
The delivery of this ever-growing backlog of mail soon became a problem of
its own; in a usual day Chebucto delivers about 24,000 messages and for
each day that mail delivery was slowed up, more and more mail would
accumulate making mail delivery even slower. For the last three days,
Technical Committee members have been using a variety of approaches to get
and keep mail moving. The high system loads caused by the massive amounts
of mail being processed had been causing time-outs and delays in sending
and receiving mail through home computer mail programs, notably Outlook
Express, as well as difficulty logging into the Chebucto text service.
All Chebucto Plus and Chebucto
text account services are believed to be working normally now.
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.
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 processingSETI, 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 1,511,000 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 advisoryAfter 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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