Internet SIG Meeting...20 Oct 1997


	Fifteen people turned up today, and an interesting day it
was too.  A quick go around the table went a full two hours.

	Neville Anderson had dug up more information on
"Internetting on the Power Lines". Faster, Cheaper Net via power
lines is an article you can find from:
http://www.australian.aust.com/computer/fulltext/c1014f.htm
ACTEW is still going ahead with this idea, and if you are
interested in Telstra Shares, read Fist's article at
http://www.australian.aust.com/computer/columns/fist.htm
Stewart Fist has his own web site apparently at;
http://www.electric-words.com

	An intelligence report from the back of Fraser stated
that Telstra was laying a 200 pair cable "for a customer" Our
agent wondered who the customer was. Get back up there Wolf, and
follow that cable.

	The Flight Simulator SIG is almost ready to go, Roger
Lowrie will have a notice in this months Sixteen Bits , we hope,
calling for expressions of interest, and the preferred time of
meeting. The Yardleys reported that a Paradise Air DC3 now flys
much better now that a patch has been received

	Elizabeth had a  problem that developed into a very
interesting discussion. She had received an  e-mail from a
relative whose e-mail address was xxxx@signus.uwa.edu.au   When
she replied to that address, she received a message "GPPD New
message Accept" .
	Allan surmised that it was UWA's set up which originated
this message, though what gppd stood for was anyones guess. Here
at TIP we have Supreme, Cheese, and Tomato for PCUG members.
Virtually all mail is housed on one of these machines, news on
another etc.
	Universities have a number of machines as well, like at
ANU there is STUDENT from where all students do their thing, and
RSC is the machine where allocated to the Research School of
Chemistry .
	These different machines probably allow for a form of
control and accounting, and also different firewalls may apply,
you may for example get to anu.edu.au, but you may not be able to
get to rsc.anu.edu.au.
	At TIP, fire walling is mainly router blocking, you can
not access our news machine from say an ANU machine. In fact the
only access to our news other than for members is Access One, our
main news feed, and InterACT, a tributary news feed.

	Anyway, getting back to  receipted mail, some mail
programs allow you to request a receipt, about 50% of servers
provide this facility, this is a positive acknowledgement that
the recipients server has the message, but there is no receipt
when the recipients collects the mail.
	 If you receive a reject message from your own server,
this means most likely that the domain name has disappeared, or
you have entered it incorrectly. A reject message from the far
server would possibly mean your corresspondent is no longer in
existence.
	Lots of messages end up in that big bit bucket in the
sky.

	Emil Joseph drew our attention to two articles in todays
CT. One was a program , WinDelete97, which sorts out all your
duplicate and unwanted files, and eventually can save you heaps
of HDD space. He also drew attention to the security hole in
MSIE4, which should be fixed in a month or so.
	Elizabeth then related how she had clicked on something
and received a warning message from Microsoft "You will lose
everything.. Register now" She got quite a fright so registered,
but has now forgotten what is was she registered for. It was a
fair bet that she would receive snail junk mail inviting her to
join Communique, to which she already subscribes.

	While on MSIE, it was reported that over 7000 pages were
stored in one machine, MSIE had the cache set at 10% of disk
capacity, which is a bit of a trap when you are using a 3 GByte
HDD. Netscapes idea of setting cache size to say 6MBytes was a
far better idea.
For users of TIP, there are a number of caches.
Yours in your machine
The one stored on TIP
The ones stored on the peered ISPs of InterACT and Sprint
and after that, it is back to the original page.
	On TIP you will get the page as is if it is less than an
hour old, after that an update check is made to see if the page
has changed , and if so the new page collected, otherwise, you
get the TIP cached page. You can always Shift-Reload to get the
original page.
	http://wkweb2.cableinet.co.uk/comtel/webcache.htm
apparently has a good run down on caches. There may be a more
local one, so please post if you know it.

	Emil reported on a program called Virtual CD, this allows
you to install a CD onto your HDD, as long as you have the
space,and it will then operate like a 20X CD. Hopefully Emil will
post the details as there were a few interested in this program.
	Now with the size of HDDs these days, one wonders what
will become of Jute Boxes, maybe our BBS will not need the Jute
Box replaced, just buy a 3 GByte HDD and install the disks (if
there is going to be anymore of them) onto the HDD.

For those interested in antispamming measures and e-mail
filtering, here is one of the best

>From: mikroa@ix.newtcom.com (Michael Roach)
.
.
>[remove w from ID & add "and bacon" to mail subject to avoid spam filter]

So not only do the email bots get the wrong address, the subject
in any e-mail reply needs to be amended with "and bacon" to pass
his own filter system.
Generally it was felt that TIPs anti spamming measures were
working pretty well, though no one knew what stats there were on
the messages rejected from spammers.

	Next meeting I believe is 3 Nov 1997 unless otherwise
advised. Please feel free to attend, it is all good information,
thanks to our resident expert,  Allan Mikkelsen who chairs the
meeting.


Owen


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