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News
Updates to this page will probably be infrequent.
July 1, 2008 noonSorry about the long interval since the last entry. We plan to migrate to a faster connection soon. As part of that migration we plan mostly to use NAT (Network Address Translation) with so-called "private" addresses for customers who do not need a "public" address on the internet. If you need to have your connection publicly addressable, please let us know, although we will assume that those paying for a static IP (Internet Protocol) address are doing so for that purpose. The static addresses will change with the new connection. If your computer or router, whichever connects to us, is getting its IP address automatically via DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol), the transition should go smoothly. If your configuration is set for manual static IP address, though, we will need to change that. Preferably, we would change it to DHCP, but there may be valid reasons to continue with a manual setting that we will need to correct. We have not set an effective date for this yet, but it will be after July 15, although we may be able to test with volunteer customers before then. Check this page for updates.
February 25, 2007 10 AMThere were two power problems Saturday, February 24, 2007, that caused all the equipment at the LA Commnet network center to restart, at about 11:50 AM and 5:40 PM. The earlier one also caused a switch at the Quemazon wireless link site to stop working so communication through that wireless link stopped until the equipment at Quemazon was restarted manually at about 12:25 noon. And it caused utter failure of a customer router where both the router and all equipment connected to it were on UPS (uninterruptible power supply.) The status of the spam filter and server replacement is that it is still in beta test. The Maia Mailguard system works at around 99% efficiency for most subscribers. That is, it classifies about 990 out of 1000 messages the way the subscriber would, and the ones it gets wrong tend to be "false positive" so the subscriber gets about 9 of the 1000 that they didn't want, but only misses about 1 of the 1000 that they did want. However, the database part of the system seems to be using resources ineffectively, so the delays for subscribers in dealing with the web interface are sometimes several to tens of seconds, so we want to improve the database tuning before we put it into production use. We have ordered additional bandwidth which should be installed by early March. We'll try multiplying most subscribers' speed by a factor of about 2.5. This probably means that we will disconnect from Oso Grande, and Cyber Mesa will be our sole supplier, for now. We will probably make more changes in February, 2008, or sooner if we expand our subscribership, especially if we add more subscribers at higher rates.
December 11, 2006 2 PMThe spam effort has been delayed because there was no user control mechanism. But on November 18, we found a package named Maia Mailguard that looked like it could provide the user controls. And we installed it, and we still had problems with the filters letting lots of spam messages through, so we kept trying to learn how to train the system to do a better job. On December 6, we finally fixed the filter problems, and since then the filtering has been doing an amazing job for our test users. Now we need to transfer the other jobs still done on our old server to the new server, then we can switch to the new server.
November 16, 2006 11 AM(note) It appears the connection came back just shortly after 11 AM! Oso Grande Technologies says Qwest is telling them all their connections might be up by around noon. They also say that the augur was basically a masonry drill making a hole in a wall, but an electric cable in the wall got caught in the drill bit, and that cable started winding up, and it pulled on the conduit where the fiber was, and that stretched the fiber bundle enough to break it. It's an OC-192 bundle. I guess that's 96 pairs, 192 fibers.
November 15, 2006 (Wednesday)Qwest says a 96-fiber bundle near the Albuquerque main Central Office was cut by an augur at about 5:10 PM Central Time (they're in Minneapolis, so they don't go by Mountain Time.) Estimated repair is at 8 PM Thursday, I suppose also Central, but maybe that is Mountain. Or sooner. The initial estimate was 3 hours, so I guess they just arbitrarily added 24 hours because their gut feel was it looked bad. All the State of New Mexico internet service is out due to this! And the State has highest priority on getting theirs fixed. Fortunately, our connection with Cybermesa is still working, so we're not completely dead, just degraded. But connection with lanl.gov seems to be dead to Cybermesa, too, so probably the Albuquerque es.net connectivity is dead or severely degraded, too, at least during Wednesday evening.
November 1, 2006We have been testing an e-mail server that includes some spam and malware filtering, and webmail, since August 1, with a few customers. The original plan was to make that the production e-mail server sometime in September, and here we are two months past that. Our current plan is to shift to it in November, we hope sooner rather than later.
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