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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
November 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.
MV to participate in NH Network trial
MV Communications will be participating in a 3-month pilot net-
working program designed to test a form of information service in New
Hampshire. This program, running from January through March of 1993,
is administered by the University of New Hampshire on behalf of the
Public Utilities Commission, and is being done with the cooperation of
New England Telephone Co., Digital Equipment Corp., the Manchester
Union Leader, and other New Hampshire businesses. It's designed to
show to the participants of the pilot the benefits of computer net-
working, and uses NET's InfoPath data service. InfoPath is a service
wherein an information customer (e.g. an individual) can be connected
to one of any number of registered information providers. This ser-
vice is already active in several New England states; for one example,
in Massachusetts, an InfoPath customer can access card catalogs of
participating town libraries.
Although this pilot project is a closed test with a limited
number of users, it may mark the awakening of parts of NH government,
business, and citizens to the benefits of computer communication.
Phone lines
At least one site has reported some contention on the dial-in
lines to MV, and we'll be adding another phone line shortly. We
appreciate being informed of this kind of trouble, as you probably
notice it before we do.
Remember that the official modem telephone number for all of our
modems is 603-429-1735. This will give you access to all of the lines
in the hunt group, including the new line when it's installed.
Downtime
We've experienced another rash of outages recently, and this is
due to the same old thing: FTP accesses to the MV computer trigger a
MV Communications, Inc. November 1992
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bug in the TCP/IP subsystem of our UNIX operating system. A recent
major increase in FTP demand has made it come up again (most often in
the wee hours of the morning). We've finally, finally gotten an
admission from the UNIX vendor that indeed it looks like the bug is in
their product, and they continue to assure us that they are looking
into it. Up until now, we've only enabled FTP access during off
hours, but at this point we are shutting off the access altogether,
and intend to move this facility to another machine where it won't
interfere with the main function of the MV system.
Mailing lists
One of the great sources of information, pleasure, and, yes,
noise is the wealth of mailing lists available through the networks.
A mailing list is a mechanism for communicating about a special topic
to a lot of other people who share interest in the topic subject.
Every mailing list has a person or group of people responsible for
running the list. Mailing lists generally come in a number of forms
depending on how actively they are moderated by the maintainer: on one
end of the spectrum, everything you send to the list will immediately
be sent out to the members of the list; on the other end, the modera-
tor takes submissions to the list and combines them into summaries
along with expert commentary.
There are literally hundreds of lists out there; a "list of
lists" is periodically published in various Usenet newsgroup. We keep
a recent copy of this list, which describes hundreds of the better-
known lists, in the file /news2/pub/mv/news/maillists on mv. (This is
over 150KB; a compressed version is /news2/pub/mv/news/maillists.Z.)
ClariNet
Another important information source is the ClariNet news ser-
vice. This is a commercial service that brings to your computer, via
the Usenet News mechanism, real world news (in the form of UPI
newswires), computer industry news, business news, sports, local news
reports, feature columnists (such as Dave Barry and Mike Royko), and
others. Everything is neatly categorized into a large number of dif-
ferent groups, so if you want to look for just, say, Supreme Court
news, then local New England news, followed by top world stories and
professional football coverage, you simply read those 4 groups first.
ClariNet offers many different subpackages, but through an arrangement
made by MV Communications, the whole service (or whatever parts you
enable) can be had for $15/month for home use. Send electronic mail
to info@clarinet.com, or call 1-800-USE-NETS, for information about
this and about trial subscriptions.
MV Communications, Inc. November 1992
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Miscellany/Reminders
* We can fetch files via FTP for you to UUCP to your systems; send
mail to %mv-admin@mv.mv.com with as much detail as you know. We
can also perform searches for things you are looking for.
* Have a special requirement? Let us know. For instance, if your
system is shutting down for a vacation, we can install special
handling of mail for your system (for instance, returning a
recorded message to the sender, forwarding the mail to another
place, or simply keeping your mail from being returned while you
are down).
* Feedback is always welcome by sending us mail (mv-
admin@mv.mv.com) or calling us at (603) 429-2223. As we hope you
understand, the office is often unmanned, but an answering
machine will take your message. In an emergency, you can try to
reach one of us via our home or daytime numbers:
home day
Mark Mallett (603) xxx-xxxx (603) xxx-xxxx
Marta Greenberg (603) xxx-xxxx (603) xxx-xxxx
MV Communications, Inc. November 1992