[Ccil-user] Upcoming Changes

[Eric Reischer]

First of all, I know there have been several lengthy emails sent to this 
list recently, so I'm going to keep this one short.

With all the potentially bad news that has been floating around, I wanted 
to introduce some good news into the discussion to help out anybody who is 
deciding whether or not to join CCIL's volunteer group.
The technical team, which currently consists of Chuck Peters (the system 
administrator), Jason Wood (the webmaster/programmer), Kathy Miles (the 
help desk coordinator), and myself (the network administrator), have been 
working together to bring CCIL's services up to date.  Chuck, Jason, and 
Kathy will most likely elaborate on their individual projects, but I would 
like to inform the CCIL users about one of our biggest projects that we 
have been working on, which is the "digital upgrade."  Basically, what this 
means to you, the user, is that within the next month or two, we will be 
offering 56k dialup service to the internet.  Right now, due to the 
limitations of our hardware and phone line quality, the maximum speed 
anybody can connect to CCIL is 33.6kbps.  We have recently purchased new 
hardware that will (hopefully) not only provide us with more reliable 
dialup services, but will also pave the way for increasing our line pool, 
thereby reducing or completely eliminating busy signals. And since we will 
be completely replacing our current dialup hardware, there will be no more 
"ring-ring" problems (where you dial in but our modem never picks up).  I 
know this is a source of great frustration for a lot of you, and believe me 
when I say that it has been equally frustrating to Chuck and myself, as we 
are constantly repairing and replacing faulty modems, and calling Verizon 
to complain about poor line quality.
Chuck and Jason have been working to make our other services more stable 
and reliable as well.  A few months ago, we set up what's called an offsite 
mail backup.  This server, generously provided by Penn State University, 
will accept all of CCIL's mail in the unlikely event that West Chester 
University's internet connection is interrupted.  Once WCU's internet 
connection is restored, your mail is automatically forwarded to CCIL's mail 
servers for you to download it as usual.  Chuck has also been working on 
backup systems, so that in the event of a hard drive failure, your data is 
safely stored in at least one other place for it to be recovered onto a 
replacement hard drive.  Jason is working on a new authentication system 
which will centralize a lot of CCIL's services.  This project is critical 
to CCIL's smooth operation, but it will not be as "visible" to the user as 
the 56k access will be, but equally important.

The above projects are just the tip of the iceberg of what we have going on 
behind the scenes at CCIL right now.  On behalf of the entire technical 
team, I would like to thank all of you, our users, for your patience with 
us through the many problems that have arisen over the years.  We hope that 
this last group of projects will help to eliminate most, if not all of 
those problems.  (Of course, this is not to say that the new systems won't 
have their own set of problems, but we are working on building redundancies 
into our systems as well, so that if one were to go down there will always 
be a backup to take its place.)

Again, thank you for your continued support of CCIL.

Sincerely,
Eric Reischer  (emr@ccil.org)
CCIL Network Administrator

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Eric Reischer                                 emr@engr.de.psu.edu
"The universe is full of magical things patiently
waiting for our wits to grow sharper."  -- Eden Phillpots
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