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M V C o m p l e m e n t
February/March 1995
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!
New staff member at MV
Mark Drewel (docwho@mv.mv.com) has joined the support staff
of MV. Mark is experienced in various SLIP and PPP platforms and
is rapidly coming up to speed on the online account side of
things.
Some words about the mv newsgroups
We maintain a set of usenet newsgroups that can be read by
all users, whether online or IP. There are some primary news-
groups for user discussions:
mv.forum.general General discussions
mv.forum.online For online (shell) accounts
mv.forum.dialip For DialIP accounts
mv.forum.offline For offline mail and news readers for online accounts
Important functions of these groups include:
o Announcements from MV staff about things happening here,
such as scheduled outages, information about things that
are planned, and descriptions of problems that may have
occurred. These are always posted in mv.forum.general as
well as to any other applicable group. See also
mv.admin.announce.
o Other communications from MV staff which are not neces-
sarily announcements.
o Public conversations amongst MV subscribers, for instance
questions about specific software platforms, comments
about network events or about MV service - things that are
addressed to other subscribers.
But these groups should not be used for:
o Cross-posting messages to other network-wide newsgroups
that have no relation to MV subscriber interests.
Crossposting NH community questions to a nh.general news-
group is likely OK, but crossposting a C++ language ques-
tion to a c++ newsgroup is not. Remember the newsgroups
work best when the appropriate focus is kept.
o Comments or questions intended for MV staff. Not every
member of MV staff reads all of the mv newsgroups; and
those that read particular newsgroups are likely to skip
some of the subject threads, just as with any other news-
group. Also, we are unlikely to answer questions that we
feel other users may be better qualified for, e.g.
specific questions about the behaviour of certain PPP or
SLIP software.
We like to see continuing use of the mv newsgroups, including
(perhaps especially) those postings that take us to task for
things that we may not be doing right.
More and more modems (including V.34)
In early March (the 3rd), we added phone lines to our main
hunt group in Litchfield so that that group is completely full:
it has the maximum number of lines that NYNEX's Merrimack office
is configured for. NYNEX will be adding to that office the capa-
bility of having more lines in a hunt group, and this should hap-
pen shortly. But because of this limitation our next group of
lines, added in late March, began a new hunt group, and further
lines will be added onto this group until the two groups can be
combined. What this means is that until that time, there are now
two different numbers in Litchfield that you can try: 424-7428
(our usual number), and 424-6195 (the second group).
Over the last two months, modems have been added to all
locations except Concord, and all of these modems have been
V.34-capable. The list of modem numbers (available on our WWW
page, or our gopher and FTP servers, or online in
/pub/mv/info/phone-numbers) indicates the numbers at which V.34
capabilities starts. Over time we expect to upgrade all the V.fc
modems to V.34 .
Bigger and Better Connections for Peterborough and Dover
By the time you read this, barring unexpected delay, the
backbone Internet connection to both the Dover and the Peterbor-
ough locations should be full T1 speed. These locations started
off with a 56Kb link (that's 56000 bits per second), and interest
in those locations necessitated and allowed this upgrade to T1
speed (just over 1.5 million bits per second). Thanks to all our
Dover and Peterborough customers for allowing this to happen.
New Hours for MV Support Staff
With the addition of Mr. Drewel, MV has increased its office
coverage for telephone and email support. New hours are:
Monday through Friday: 8:30AM to 9:30PM
Saturday: 10AM to 5PM
MV coming to Salem
At long last we are bringing up our Salem access location.
As some of you may have known through the grapevine, this has
been in the works since last summer, and now that all the papers
have been thoroughly shuffled and exchanged, we'll have Salem
access numbers coming online in late April. Watch the newsgroups
for specifics.
Billing
Billing has lately (well, for the past year) been prob-
lematic at MV. This month we're doing a double bill, covering
the months of January and February. We're in a long-term process
of revamping and streamlining our billing system, but its comple-
tion is still months away. Please bear with us in the meantime:
next cycle will likely also be a double bill, hopefully a little
sooner than two months away.
S.314 - the Internet Killer Bill
US Senate bill S.314 has recently been attached (in a
slightly modified form) to the telecommunications reform legisla-
tion currently fast-tracked in the Congress. In its unmodified
form this bill would have made businesses such as MV liable for
any "indecent," "lewd," "obscene" or otherwise offensive material
passing through its machines, whether in public newsgroups,
private email, or even WWW pages somewhere else on the Net. It's
not clear that MV would be able to remain in business with the
passage of the unmodified bill. At the moment, the modifications
have yet to be made public, so we can't comment on its potential
impact. However, this is under active discussion by the EFNH
(Electronic Frontiers New Hampshire) - if you think your own con-
trol over your own conversation is more important than the
government's (or perhaps if you feel the other way), please fol-
low along and do what you can. See http://www.efnh.org.
MV Communications, Inc. (603) 429-2223