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M V C o m m e n t a r y
October 1994
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found
on mv in the public archive; look in /pub/mv/inews. They're also in the
online menu!
What's going on with the phones lately?
In August, NYNEX began installing a fiber distribution cabinet at
our premises in Litchfield. This was the result of over a year's worth
of discussion between MV and NYNEX, and was finally triggered when we
began to run short of available copper wiring coming into our building.
At this time NYNEX was also interested in reclaiming for residential use
the telephone circuits that we were using out of the box a couple of
miles down the street.
During the installation process, we've been unable to order more
telephone lines, and this has increased the contention on the dialin
lines that we have now. You may have noticed an unhealthy number of
busy signals lately, especially in the early evening.
The installation is due to be completed on November 11, and we have
an order for more than a dozen new phone lines to come in as soon as
possible after that. Also, we will be scheduling the transfer of our
existing phone circuits over to the new fiber cabinet shortly after-
wards. Once this entire process is completed, our Litchfield dial-in
lines will be on all fiber circuits except for the final 10 feet or so
of wiring from the NYNEX equipment to the modems themselves.
Dover and Concord online: phone numbers
On a positive note, our Concord and Dover nodes are up and running
now and have been for some time. Both nodes support online accounts,
Dialup IP (SLIP and PPP) accounts, and UUCP accounts using Microcom
DeskPorte FAST modems.
The phone number for Dover is 740-9152, and the number for Concord
is 228-7181. The Litchfield number is still 424-7428 for up to 14.4Kb
and 429-3592 for 28.8Kb. We also have a number in Manchester (645-NETS)
and Nashua (888-NETS) that access the Litchfield site - use these only
if you are not local to the 424/429 numbers but are local to one of
these.
When you dial any of our regular dialup numbers, you will get a
Connect: prompt. At this prompt you can enter any of the following:
info To log into the information and registration area.
mv To connect to MV's online system in Litchfield.
concord To connect to MV's online system in Concord.
dover To connect to MV's online system in Dover.
Other entries may be given as appropriate to specific customer use.
If you're calling for UUCP, your UUCP script will enter the uucp desig-
nation for your UUCP host, and if you are a SLIP and PPP user, you'll
log in with your account information at the Connect: prompt.
Online users and UUCP account users can dial any of the direct
numbers to be connected to the appropriate host. This is good to know
if you find yourself in an area of the state not local to the number you
normally dial, but local to one of the other numbers. It's also useful
if you want to tell somebody how to get information about us: info
works everywhere. At this time, though, SLIP and PPP users must dial
the location that hosts your account.
As a final note, we plan to open a Peterborough node in late
November.
More Staffing
Paul Hurley (paul@mv.mv.com, aka rat@mv.mv.com) has joined our
staff. His primary role is technical: he'll be working on system tools,
network administration, and in general helping to make things work
better and easier and to let us implement more of the things we need.
However he may also from time to time be assisting in support issues,
particularly those pertaining to the Macintosh environment.
Finding things around the Net
As you undoubtedly know, there are many ways to interact with the
Internet. One of the traditional ways to ease this interaction is to
peruse the "topic" guides a number of people maintain for the different
Internet access methods.
The following are archived and available by anonymous ftp at
rtfm.mit.edu:
Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists:
/pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/mailing-lists
Anonymous FTP Sites Listing
/pub/usenet/new.answers/ftp-list/sitelist (for the sitelist)
/pub/usenet/news.answers/ftp-list/faq (for the FAQ List (ASCII
files))
Listing of newsgroups in the "alt" hierarchy
pub/usenet-by-group/alt.answers/alt-newsgroups/
Listing of newsgroups in the standard hierarchy
pub/usenet-by-group/news.answers/active-newsgroups/
You can also get a listing of MUDs (Multi-user dimensions):
Find it with lynx (on mv) or Mosaic (over SLIP) at the URL
http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/User/Andrew.Wilson/MUDlist/
Question of the Month
Last month we asked about "nh.general" and other New Hampshire
newsgroups. We didn't get much response - but the nh.general group has
been fairly busy. From this we can only guess that the current NH
hierarchy is satisfactory.
This months' question:
What new ways do you think the Internet will grow over the
next few years, and where you think MV's place in it should
be?
Please email your answers to mv-qotm@mv.mv.com.
MV Communications, Inc.