More than 100,000 email messages to Chebucto users that had been delayed due to a weekend service disruption have now been delivered. The huge volume of mail has been causing slow service as the mail server has been pushed to its limit. Chebucto Technical Committee members have been working hard, sometimes around the clock, to speed up mail delivery. They had set priority to newer messages while setting older mail to be processed as fast as the system would allow and have been manually sorting through the mail queue to remove large numbers of duplicate spam messages and the message bounces from mis-addressed spam. The Chebucto mail server has also been physically reconfigured to enable it to work at its peak efficiency.

The problem started on Saturday morning, June 21, with the total failure of a key hard drive on Chebucto's main server, which caused all Chebucto services except for the Chebucto Plus dialup service to go down. The two year old hard drive, still under its original warranty, was replaced with a newer hard drive by early Saturday afternoon but restoring the data to it from the nightly tape backups took another twenty four hours. In the meantime, mail to Chebucto users and mailing lists continued to build up.

The delivery of this ever-growing backlog of mail soon became a problem of its own; in a usual day Chebucto delivers about 24,000 messages and for each day that mail delivery was slowed up, more and more mail would accumulate making mail delivery even slower. For the last three days, Technical Committee members have been using a variety of approaches to get and keep mail moving. The high system loads caused by the massive amounts of mail being processed had been causing time-outs and delays in sending and receiving mail through home computer mail programs, notably Outlook Express, as well as difficulty logging into the Chebucto text service.

All Chebucto Plus and Chebucto text account services are believed to be working normally now.

Chebucto Newspaper Column Give-aways!

Chebucto mousepads may be purchased from the Chebucto Office for $10 each or mailed out for $15 each. Contact office@chebucto.ns.ca to order.

Alert: Fake Windows updates

Chebucto advises all users of the Windows Operating System to keep updated with the latest security updates from Microsoft. There are major security holes in the Microsoft Windows Operating System, Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and Microsoft's Outlook Express email program which can be fixed with software patches from Microsoft's authentic Windows Update site.

Unpatched versions of these Microsoft products are vulnerable to many viruses, worms, trojan programs and exploits where hostile users can get access to your computer and files. Users are advised to keep current with Service Packs and Critical Updates for Microsoft products.

Chebucto Users still tops in *.NS.CA SETI processing

Of all the computer domains ending in the letters NS.CA, denoting Nova Scotia, chebucto.ns.ca now ranks number one, producing more than double the results of both the government of Nova Scotia and the vast resources of EdNet, the schools network combined. Current stats here. Chebucto users have sent in more than 21,000 results, representing more than 43 years of CPU time that would otherwise have been wasted.

SETI is about to enter a new phase, targetting the top 200 candidate signals for direct observation using the full resources of the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

Outlook user email advisory

Windows Users can find a selection of email programs available for download here and Macintosh users can find a selection of email programs here.

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