Artemis Project: June ECTC Status Report

THE ARTEMIS PROJECT
PRIVATE ENTERPRISE ON THE MOON

1999 ECTC Status Reports
Section 9.1.1999.

Home

Tour

Join!

Contents

Team

News

Catalog

Search

Comm

June ECTC Status Report

june-ectc-status by Randall Severy

June 1999 was a month of cleanup and preparation for the Electronic Communications Technical Committee, as the Artemis Project web site settled into its new home on the CyberTeams dedicated server. Most of the services on the web site that were suspended during the move last month have been reconfigured and restarted on the new server. Preparations also got underway for the Artemis Society's first live webcast as co-sponsor of the upcoming Lunar Base Development Symposium in Houston in the middle of July.

Note: there will not be an ECTC Status Report next month, as the ECTC Chairman takes his annual August break from writing status reports ;-). Activity in the ECTC in July and August will be reported in a combined status report that will be produced in early September.

The ECTC membership grew by four members in July. Brian Coleman, Jim Burk, Jens Lerch, and Valentin Navarrete all joined the ECTC last month. You can find the complete ECTC membership listing at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html . As always, there is still a lot of room for new volunteers for ECTC tasks. If you would like to join the ECTC, you can sign up through Team Director at http://www.asi.org/teamdir . To review the ECTC project list and sign up to help with any of those projects, use the form 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:

Membership Support

Five more ASI members signed up for Team Director accounts in June. A minor update was made to Team Director during the month to fix some small problems that had been reported previously.

Help Desk

Nanci's sister, Dawna, continued manning the Communications and Information Center in Nanci's absence.

Electronic Mailing Lists

One of the more eventful times in the migration of the ASI mailing lists to the new server took place on June 4, when Vik Olliver sent a test message to the art-3d mailing list on the new server. What started as a simple test escalated into a runaway infinite loop of e-mail that overwhelmed poor Vik and inundated subscribers to all ASI mailing lists with dozens of messages. Before the transfer of the mailing lists to the new server, the subscriber list for the art-3d list was mangled and ended up including most of the subscribers from all ASI mailing lists. One of those addresses was someone running an improperly configured vacation program, which responded to every message sent to the mailing list, including its own responses. Over the next 40 minutes, 48 messages were sent to the art-3d list, 40 of them automated replies from the vacation program, before the infinite loop was shut down. Vik, as owner of the list, however, received bounce errors from the many invalid addresses on the mangled list, and his e-mail account was saturated with several thousand messages within minutes.

Soon after that crisis was resolved, the mailing list digest processing was started on the new server and the ASI mailing lists were fully back to normal. During the month, Bobby Will set up a new mailing list, asi-pubs, for the Publications Team, and changed the list owner for the lunar-industries list to Gregory Nemitz.

World Wide Web Server

Most of the cleanup activity following the domain move involved services running on the Artemis Project web site. By the end of June, all but one of the services that had been suspended during the move had been put back in operation, and the one remaining service, the Cronkite news service, was restarted in early July. The ADB Outline Generator was upgraded to use the MySQL database server on the new server and a new version of the WebGlimpse search engine was installed and configured to provide a search capability on the web site. A problem in WebSite Director that was causing e-mail notifications to fail was corrected and e-mail notifications resumed early in the month. Some of the CGI scripts used in signup forms on the web site were updated to use the new locations of programs on the new server.

The Artemis Project web site grew by a small amount in June, with a total of 38 updates published to the site, including 15 new documents, 22 modifications to existing documents, and one moved document. The latest updates bring the total number of documents on the web site to 2802 HTML documents and the number of GIF and JPEG images grew to 1128 images. Most of the work in editing and approving the updates was done by Dale Gray, Gregory Bennett, Candace Bartleson, John Wertz, Randall Severy, David Wetnight, and Dana Carson. Updates were also submitted by Jim Sealy, Jr., Robert Lancaster, and Predrag Lezaic.

WWW Conversation Pages

Randall Severy began investigating a product that will provide web-based access to discussions on the Artemis Project web site. These discussions will be automatically linked to the ASI mailing lists and corresponding newsgroups.

Usenet newsgroups

The product mentioned above will also provide newsgroup services on the asi.org domain that will be linked automatically to the ASI mailing lists and the web conversation pages.

Online Services

No progress to report this month.

Real-time Meetings

A lot of activity in June focused on the webcast for the upcoming Lunar Base Development Symposium. The webcast will hosted on the Artemis Project
web site, with a special hostname, webcast.asi.org, set up for the event. An initial test of the live audio broadcast and webcam snapshot capability that will be used for the webcast took place on Saturday June 26, during the regular Saturday Artemis Open Forum meeting on IRC. The test was successful and validated the key components of the webcast infrastructure. Several people had problems listening to the audio broadcast, and additional research took place to find client software that is compatible with the audio server that will be used for the webcast.

The June ECTC IRC meeting was held on June 6th, and was an extremely productive meeting. A total of nine people showed up for some or all of the meeting, including several new members. The meeting opened with the latest status from the server move and then moved into a lengthy discussion about an Artemis Project category in the new Open Directory service. Jim Burk, a new ASI and ECTC member, volunteered to lead a team that will maintain that Artemis Project category. The Web Team portion of the meeting focused heavily on two key areas, the Internet Site Design project, and a proposal to put the content of the Artemis Project web site on an upcoming CD-ROM from the Mars Society.

Miscellaneous