A fiber cable was severed in Dallas, TX that left the KloneZone without connection to the internet from last Tursday night until Monday morning. Service has been restored. There will still be sporadic outages as the LAN here at my home is upgraded.
I have begun installing CAT 5 drops in the bedrooms and purchased a pair of 10/100 base T autosensing ethernet switches. Three of the four primary wire runs are installed, but I still have the longest wire run to install in the attic and have finishing touches to complete, such as installing wall plates and putting on connectors, as well as some wall patching to do.
System performance appears slightly faster, probably becasue the modem is closer to the outside drop. Maybe it is just my imagination, grin.
The BBS is undegoing some conference additions. The new areas can be found in the User Message section's "Fidonet" for a folder called "New_Unsorted_Echoes"... Currently there are 280 areas in there.
Virus Causes No Damage Here. This system received a copy of the original "LoveLetter" virus, and of course there was no damage nor further spread of the virus. Copies of the file are available online for review in the Sysop's message section and in the Telefinder Syop's message sections. Moral: If you do not use Microsoft products, then you dramatically lower your personal and corporate risk.
New Conference Changes. The fidonet conference "SYSTEM7" has been renamed on this system to "Mac_OS" to reflect the current naming conventions used by Apple for operating system releases. The fidonet conference "MACSYSOP" is apparently not being gated by the system that supplies the one upstream from this one. I am working to correct this problem.
The KloneZone Servers are online. There are new message areas on the system and traffic appearing in some formerly dormant areas. Please check these out. A list of available network message areas will be posted soon, to allow the users to provide suggestions for new areas to be incorporated. This list will be found in the users file section in the "Documents" folder, along with a list of the areas currently active on the system.
The Klonezone unix server (216.228.135.45) was online, but is scheduled for downtime. There are three disks in the server that are due for replacement with a single higher capacity unit. This downtime will also affect the BBS, because the Mac server is currently using the disk destined for the unix server. Both servers will be down to transfer files, reformat disks and reinstall software and data files.
Problems with the Fidonet network are now corrected.
There was an apparent Year-2000 problem with some Fidonet systems including this one. The problem is caused by the use of only two characters to represent years (Jan 00 versus Jan 2000) in the software many systems including this use to exchange messages and mail between their systems. It manifests itself as either an incorrect date, usually in the past as indicated by messages currently received, and by an inability to relay messages to the network when the upstream system is refusing such messages. Only the first of these was true for this system.
The Administration has concluded exploring options to persue to correct this situation and has tested and incorporated a solution from Cyril Morzin which patches the Fidonet software to correct the date problem .
No Year-2000 effects have been observed in the other networks or software used on the system.The KloneZone was offline for several days on leading up to December 25 1999 and again for a few days aftwarward. The BBS CPU was used to prepare musical scores for a local Midnight mass, and as a diagnostic aid for the repair and tune-up of several Macintosh CPUs for an area school.
Old News:
The KloneZone was offline for most of the night on Friday, January 28 through the morning of Saturday, January 29 to correct a problem affecting the server, that caused it to repeatedly crash and lose track of files. Mac OX 9 was de-installed, and Mac OS 8.5 reinstalled on the startup disk.
On the down side:
Rusty Tucker has still made no attempt to contact you humble administrator regarding the future course of TeleFinder Software. He has transfered distribution rights to Bob Nunn of Headgap Systems, and apparently transfering the TFNet domain to him as well. (It is nice to know my efforts were apropriately rewarded).
The phone company indicated that the BBS is too far away to get ADSL service at this time, and that it may be available some this year.
TeleFinder Sysops should now find a link to their systems TFNet mailbox in their mailbox. This feature was added to assist TeleFinder Sysops in their efforst to estabish and maintain their TFNet connections with this system. Please notify the administrator if problems exist with accessing this resource.
User file areas are being rebuilt and CDROMS are currently offline, to conserve space on the smaller backup hard disk currently used to host the system. These should return to service as soon as a pair of larger hard disks can be obtained. (RAID is desired now!!)
My attempt to secure unlimited rights to TeleFinder Server and client sourcecode has gone unacknowledged.
My attempt to host the domains "spiderisland.com," and "tfnet.org" for the same reasons stated above has gone unacknowledged.
Support areas for third party add-in software for TeleFinder are on this site. The areas will be networked to the author's sites for these products.
An Appeal for help: The costs of these upgrades are significant and monetary assistance from the user base is appreciated.
The "KZ Users" area is back. Please take some time to place a short message about yourself in this area, now located in the "Guest-Messages/Local/" area. This is required to gain standard access to the system.
Teachers and Students. Special sections have been created to serve your needs. To gain access, submit proof of status via email along with your access request.
Please email the sysop with details of problems experienced accessing the system message areas or system web pages. --- Daniel O'Leary, Admin/WebMaster KloneZone - A TeleFinder 5.7 BBS Voice=> 817-367-2558 Dial-In=> 817-367-2517 Fidonet=> 1:130/1015 TFNet=> klonezone.tfnet.org Internet=> kz.eaze.net WWW=> http://kz.eaze.net
