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News From CPCUG's Internet Services Director (ISD)

CPCUG To Shift Hosting for CPCUG.ORG and Offer New Benefits & Other Developments
by Mark Leymaster

This new, free benefit will include web-access to manage that email from anywhere, anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, automatic forwarding to any other email account, and other advanced features. After January, each CPCUG member will have an email box with a user name in the form of [firstname].[lastname]@cpcug.org, ready for use with a temporary password that should be sent by non-electronic mail before the end of the month. Tell the CPCUG Office immediately if your non-email address needs to be updated. Members who already have accounts @cpcug.org will also have the option of replacing their default username with their prior username. (All mail received under the old username will be stored at least until March, 2006. Today's @cpcug.org customers must tell CPCUG no later than February if they will take longer to join these two startup accounts.)

Email software on user computers will just require changes to the two server addresses for those who currently use @cpcug.org, or an added profile for CPCUG members who adding their new email account for the first time. Shortly a step-by-step online guide to doing this should be available online, either here or with a link from here.

Since the new hosting may not allow us to offer affordable shell accounts, CPCUG is working on alternatives. Certainly the automatic forwarding feature will allow you to forward email to any other email address with a shell account, e.g. Millkern should be asked about transferring existing shell accounts, if you wish to continue with our old ISP. Shell accounts from other providers might also prove suitable.

Dennis Courtney, the CPCUG Past President, is the chief technician for this effort, to be assisted by a new volunteer Webmaster, Steve Chafe. Thanks gents! Despite a bad cold, Dennis described other features of this new hosting arrangements to the membership: vastly improved, rapid membership communication through these email accounts, IMAP as well as POP3 email services, subdomains for improved website architecture, and a choice of portals instead of just Mambo alone. LISTSERV software cannot be installed, but there are 5 or 6 alternatives that are offered. (The portal software and list management tool have not been chosen as of this writing.) The hosting service selected is wwww.alphaone-tech.com, and the preconfigured package with the large amount of online storage we require will cost about $75/month overall.

Dennis aims to organize a low cost option for personal web pages, perhaps using a discount given CPCUG's domain hosting, but the old arrangement does not appear to be viable without charge (on account of storage cost). One of our old ISP's problems was that it failed to charge enough for real costs like extended online storage & its backup, something that CPCUG is committed to avoid. There is no technical reason that the old URLs to personal web pages cannot be reused, but each personal web-page subscriber may need to supply the content (if Millkern is unable to restore it). Watch this page for more on how this will work, as the arrangements are resolved.

Other Developments

As of January 9th there has been no more communication on the restoration of files that Millkern may be attempting:

• Gabe Goldberg reported that though his cpcug shell account password was reset in late December, as of the General Meeting in January, none of his personal files or archives had been restored. Earlier, another user got back to his shell account and also found no personal files and a default shell which was not the one he'd configured.
• Last weekend, the Millkern status message misreported "all systems up and running" despite a dead website, no LISTSERV, and no support@cpcug.org. But it did mention restoring "directories" next which implies restoring user files.
• Millkern did acknowledge on January 10 that support@cpcug.org was not functioning, as "Millkern has taken on primary responsibility for support, since there have been no questions submitted to support in the last 15 days other than those concerning password resets. The one exception to this is a note from Mark Leymaster."
• That exception was my January 5 request to the User Support Team to report in, which went to Scott as a UST member. He did not reply, not even to tell me the dispatch tool that distributes requests to support@cpcug.org was not reset.

Another Q&A about Internet Services will be presented at the beginning of the February, 2006, General Meeting, expected to be at Washington Gas, Springfield VA, on February 13 at 7:00 P.M. Until then watch this page, and send questions to MIX-L, as described below.

Those who want to automatically forward their current @cpcug.org email from their shell account should be able to do so as follows:

Create a file in your shell account named .forward in your home directory and put the email address you want the email forwarded to in it. For example:

filename = .forward

contents = newcpcug@newsguy.com

Make sure you do not use a DOS/Windows editor like notepad or wordpad, to create the file. pico (available in all CPCUG shell accounts) works fine. So type "pico .forward" (without the quotes) and then type the email address you wish your email to be forwarded to and exit and save. Done.
Thanks to Rick Cook for this tip.

The subsitute for MIX-L is now running online, at FreeLists.Org with the continuing support of J. Casey and David Chessler. To subscribe, visit the signup page at http://www.freelists.org/list/mix-l then wait for a confirming email.

ISD Home Page

ISD Home Page

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Mail: 19209 Mt. Airey Road, Brookeville, MD 20833
Phone: (301) 762-9372; fax: (301) 762-9375; E-mail

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http://news.cpcug.org/isd/ml-11406.html
Feb. 6, 2006