Meeting 12 Apr 1999



	Internet SIG Meeting 12 Apr 1999

A nice fine day for a nice fine lot of questions.

1.Your Disk space on TIP

You are allowed 10 megs of disk space, but this can go up to 11 megs for
7 days. Here's the what if question? Say you had 7 megs used and then
uploaded a 3.4 meg file, total now 10.3 megs.

After 7 days, what happens? One member found his 3.4 meg file truncated
to 3 megs. What if you had 1000 3.4k files? Would the last 400 files
uploaded be deleted?

Allan advised that no one understood how the Solaris quota system
worked, but it did something so the safest path was to stay within the
quota, be it your WWW area or Mailbox, which is another 10 megs absolute
max.

2. Annoying Advertisements

Trevor did not like getting ads and had found two URLs
http://newlife-win98.server101.com/
http://xfx.net/utilities/popupkiller/index.html
which hadn't been tried, but reportedly killed off lots of
advertisements.

Big discussion here, it appears that some sites will not allow access if
you don't take the ads, the Sydney Opera House site was quoted as being
in this category, and others thought that if you didn't take the ads,
one day we might be asked to pay before entering the site !!!! Oh dear.

2A. Yellow Pages.

Jeff had checked the City Search URL advertised in the CT. Thought it
was good, and obviously a lot of money had been poured into a start up
competition to the Yellow pages.

I don't have that URL, so if someone would like to post it - Ta.

3.Java error

Greg had a "Java 40 class error"- it ran to about 15 lines and wondered
how to fix it. Dead silence from us all, so it was suggested that a Java
NG might provide an answer

In fact, if you have a problem that may be a little esoteric, try first
of all posting to tip.help, there is a surprising wealth of knowledge
among TIP members. Failing that, lurk in the relevant NGs, and then post
the problem together with any of the actions you have attempted to
correct the problem. World wide, there maybe someone else who has fixed
the problem.

4. Sorting IE favourites

The problem here appeared to be one of simply the mechanics of sorting
favourites in IE. A demo was arranged later for the benefit of Elizabeth
and others. In W98, it appears to be fairly easy.

5. Macros.

Perhaps he wanted to make his own address book, but Jim wanted to know
how to create a macro in Word97. The short answer, but useless, was that
it was more or less the same as in Word 6. The correct answer was to go
to the Help, and get a tutorial in making macros.

In fact, despite the ribbing that MS often gets, you will find that MS
product have a pretty good Help system, and will mostly get you out of
trouble if you are prepared to read the help. Of course, this does not
apply to address book problem.

6.Saving Web Pages.

Lou rather startled us all by stating "he had thought of something".
Sorry Lou. Well the problem was that the "london Times" web pages seemed
to be un saveable.

It appears that what is happening is that their (and others) web pages
have the minimum of HTML, and call up the news from a java script.
Saving these pages resulted in only the HTML being saved.

You can get over this by highlighting the text you want, copying it and
then pasting it in Notepad or similar. Ctrl +A, Ctrl +C, and then Ctrl
+V into Notepad.

7. Sylvia's Intermittent LPT1

Sometimes LPT1 was there, sometimes it wasn't. Emil considered this to
be most likely a poorly connected card or cable, so take the case off
and jiggle and wiggle the cables and try again.

This piece of advice was followed by a number of other stories of poorly
connected cables and boards, so as a matter of course, when you have
something fail, first check all your cables, inside and out to eliminate
that as a potential source of problems.

8. TIP Connections.

Charlie stated he had hardly ever had a drop out, BUT, sometimes he
would have 6 or so goes to get on. What was happening was that the
modems would commence a negotiation, but then the modem would "hang" and
that was it, off for another redial.

It was thought that the most likely cause was a faulty modem at TIP, but
Allan said that they have had no faulty modems for a month or so. It
might be worth noting that 95% of all calls are successful, and if you
think a 5% failure rate is high, then be advised that a 91% connection
rate is about the norm.

Allan also checks the modem logs and can generally pick a dud modem and
lock it out, but as stated earlier, there has been no duds lately.

It might also pay to switch on the Modem log and have a squizz at what
it says after a failure, there a fair chance it wont say much, but you
never know your luck.

9. Windows news groups

There are a number of NGs TIP does not get, but are obtainable from
other sources. To get these, you need to set up another instance of your
news reader, and insert the News Server name. This mainly applies to MS
and other proprietary NGs not on the main news feed.

There appears to be some disorganisation with news upstream from us, and
it isn't known when the kerfuffle will be fixed, if ever. TIP hopes to
have improved bandwidth to news in the "near" future which may improve
some of the feed problems, not only for us but for our peering links as
well.

10. Cookies and all that.

This is not a perennial question, it seems to be a daily question. Are
Cookies safe? By and large, the answer is yes, they are there to meet
some security requirements, like some banks which wont let you in if
Cookies are disabled. Also to help with keeping track of you, so say you
spend an hour widow gazing and maybe buying from an online store, it is
easiest to keep track of you via a Cookie.

All these things and more will be revealed in an article by Terry Bibo
in the next issue of Sixteen Bits.

11. Virus Updates.

Phillip could not get the McAfee updates. The short answer is to go to
http://tucows.interact.net.au and head for the Virus Scanners updates.
You will be led to the correct place to get what you want. 

12. Great Big pictures.

John Saxon, ARE YOU READING THIS. Because we now have another complaint
about your "difficult to read" web pages. However, to solve the problem
of JPGs or GIFs to big or misplaced, it is best to right click on the
picture you want and save it, then view it elsewhere.

And talking about viewers, everyone has their favourite, but there is a
freebie called Iview by a student who did it as a project, it was real
good, and even better because it was free. You will also find it on
Tucows, http://tucows.interact.net.au in the Viewers section.

13 Surge Protectors.

There was a lot of discussion on surge protectors. To summarise, and I
hope I got this right.

a.	there are two types of surges that concern us. The "brown outs"
thoughtfully provided by electricity suppliers, normally in the form of
an over voltage which destroys the nominal 240 volt equipment we run off
the mains. Secondly there is the lightning strike problem.

b. Brownouts can be fixed by power boards with a protection circuit in
them, several different modus operandi i are available, but still pretty
cheap. although we have in Canberra a very good power supply, it is
still recommended to have this protection.

c lightning strikes are a different thing, and there is really no
protection other than to disconnect the modem, and your equipment.
There are techniques available to reduce the effects of lightning, but
none will protect you 100%

d. We were also advised that a nuclear explosion, even miles from your
house will create an emp ( Electromagnetic pulse) that will destroy your
electronic equipment, so disconnect your modem and computer during the
next nuclear explosion scheduled for your neighbourhood.

e. If anyone tries to sell you a fool proof lightning protector, ask
him/her which snake oil company they worked for previously.

14. Conclusion

Allan advised that the Linux SIG that was to start this Thursday would
not be held.

Next meeting would be held 26 April 1999.

So once again, thanks Allan for running the SIG.


Owen
   


 








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