November 1996 ECTC Status Report
November turned out to be a slower than usual month for the Electronic Communications Technical
Committee, with the exception of a lot of activity on the configuration of the ASI mailing lists. There were configuration problems with several of the new mailing lists and all of the ASI mailing lists went through a configuration overhaul at the end of the month when the ASI Board of Directors requested that the lists be closed to posts from non-subscribers. The network connection problems that had hampered the first two IRC meetings worsened this month to the point that we had to move the November IRC meeting to a public IRC server.
The ECTC membership total remained the same this month, with Chuong Tran joining the team and Tom Chavez departing the group. You can find the complete ECTC membership listing at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html. There were no changes to the ECTC task list this month, but there is still plenty of room for new volunteers for tasks that are already on that list. If you would like to join the ECTC and help with any of those tasks, you can use the forms on the ECTC task list page at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc_tasks.html.
Here is the latest status information from the individual work areas
within the ECTC:
Help Desk
Nanci Brasket continued answering questions directed to the Comm and
Info Center. Nanci edited 7 new or updated web pages and 2 images and put them on the web site.
Listserver Mailing Lists
Several of the new mailing lists that were added last month turned out to have configuration problems when people started trying to use them. The e-mail aliases for the list names had not been created in the asi.org domain, but once they were created everything started working properly. The highlight of the month in this area had to be the passing of a resolution in the ASI Board of Directors to close the ASI mailing lists to allow only posts from subscribers to the mailing lists. This motion was in response to a series of spam attacks (bulk distribution of advertising) on all of the ASI mailing lists over the previous two months. At the end of the month the configuration for all of the ASI mailing lists was updated to restrict posting to only those people subscribed to the lists. Around the same time, an overnight process was set up on the asi.org domain that would automatically generate digest versions of each ASI mailing list once a day. The start of that service allows the digest lists to work properly for the first time. This month also saw some major problems with mail service on IO, the ISP that hosts the ASI domain. Early in the month a planned upgrade to their mail server went sour and in the mess that followed some private e-mail and mailing list traffic was delayed for almost a week.
World Wide Web Server
No progress to report this month.
WWW Conversation Pages
No progress to report this month.
Usenet newsgroups
Tim Cadell and Dale Amon continued to research the various issues involved with setting up the Artemis newsgroups. Most of the recent research has focused on the issues involved in moderating the newsgroups.
On-line services
No progress to report this month.
Bulletin Boards
No progress to report this month.
Real-time Meetings
The network problems that had plagued the first two IRC meetings on the ASI IRC server became unbearable this month. We attempted to hold a meeting on November 3, but no one was able to stay connected to the server for more than a few minutes. The meeting was cancelled and rescheduled for the following weekend on a different IRC server. On November 10 we held the rescheduled meeting on the SuperLink IRC server (irc.superlink.net), but had a somewhat low turnout (3 people for most of the meeting, then joined by Dana towards the end) which might have been caused by the rescheduling. On a positive note we had no network problems whatsoever with the SuperLink site, so the meeting went very smoothly. Until new arrangements are made on the ASI domain we will be holding future IRC meetings on the SuperLink IRC server.
Miscellaneous
No progress to report this month.
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