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News from:
M V C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , I n c .
P.O. Box 4963
Manchester, NH 03108-4963
(603) 429-2223
March 1992
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter
can be found on mv in the public archive; look in
/news2/pub/mv/inews.
New phone line and modem
For those of you who want V.32 access: we've recently
installed a new phone line, not on the main hunt group, that
we'll be putting one of the new Telebit T3000's on. This
number should be available by the time you read this; get in
touch if you want to make use of V.32 connectivity.
Why the separate number? As you probably know, we're
currently using a bank of Telebit Trailblazer+ modems, which
provide, in addition to normal 1200/2400 baud, 9600/14400
baud using Telebit's PEP protocol. PEP is widely used among
systems using UUCP protocols because of Telebit's success in
catering to that specific market. But with more and more
people moving to V.32/V.32bis modems, we will be putting up
Telebit T3000 modems instead of, or in addition to, the
TB+'s. The current problem with the T3000 modem is that it
does not support the PEP protocol. An upgrade is due from
Telebit within a fairly short time, but is not here yet.
(Rumor has it that this upgrade will include the new "super
PEP" -- we'll have to see if that's true.) In order to make
sure that you get PEP if you call the main number, we can
not put the T3000's on the main hunt group. Thus the new
number.
A reminder if you have a Telebit modem and are
interested in the T3000: Telebit's "Loyalty Pays" promotion
expires at the end of March. Recall that under this promo-
tion, if you own a Telebit modem you can buy a T3000 for
$495, with a free PEP upgrade thrown in free. This is not a
trade-in deal. For more information and/or to place an
order, call Telebit at 1-800-TELEBIT (1-800-835-3248).
18 March 1992
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Increase in Internet bandwidth
In response to some recent heavy demand, and for other
reasons which we may go into at a future time, we're upgrad-
ing our Internet link from a 9.6Kb to a 56Kb leased line.
Among other things, this should help to ensure that any
backlogs are dealt with in a timely fashion. After a recent
news slowdown, we found that it took almost a week to catch
up. The slowdown, and the problem in catching up, turned
out to be a misconfiguration of a router at the other end of
our leased line: nevertheless, this pointed out to us that
we needed to have a wider Internet pipe.
Recent MV crashes
When we built up a substantial backlog for one of our
clients (who is temporarily off line) recently, we went
through a period of system crashes that occured about once
every day. We believe we tracked this down to a set of sys-
tem parameters that was set too low for the sudden TCP/IP
demand placed by rejecting several hundred messages at once
(during a nighly maintenance job) out of that backlog of
messages. We increased a few of these parameter values and
have not experienced these crashes since.
MV Archives
New arrivals in the MV archive (as always, check out
the ls-lR file for a complete directory):
/news2/pub/security/cops_104.tar.Z: a new version of the
COPS system security checker. It's 409395 bytes long.
/news2/pub/tmp/GAO contains several reports from the Govern-
ment Accounting Office that were made available online.
(These will only be kept online on MV temporarily.) They
include two reports on high-performance computing, and one
on computer security and hacker intrusions into DOD comput-
ers during Desert Storm. There's also an extensive list of
GAO publications. Download the README file for more info.
Miscellany
Last month we mentioned the availability of ClariNet
groups. We neglected to mention that there's a newsgroup,
biz.clarinet.sample, that carries samples from ClariNet.
This group is freely distributable and serves to show some
of the things that ClariNet offers. Several ClariNet infor-
mational documents are available in /news2/pub/mv/clarinet
on mv; check out the ls-lR file in the top of the public
area (/news2/pub).
The NSF recently released a new Acceptable Use
18 March 1992
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Guidelines document. This is a one-page memo similar to the
previous one that you should have received and read; it is
similar in spirit, but a little more explicit. This docu-
ment is online as /news2/pub/mv/policies/nsfnet on mv.
Looking for 386/486 systems? Check with us, we often
have access to good deals.
We often receive mail messages with questions, requests
for advice, people looking for work, and so forth. For gen-
eral questions, we'd like to encourage the use of regional
newsgroups and/or mailing lists. Keep in mind that there's
a group, mv.general, that exists to carry general talk of
local interest.
18 March 1992