Hi, here's a short summary of what's been on the ALUG mailing list in the last 2 weeks. Hopefully, in future, these will be done weekly. Any volunteers for a rota? All that you need is some saved ALUG messages...

Where I know IRC nicknames they're included in the write-up somewhere. I hope this is useful for the Monday evening IRC meetings, but if I've fluffed one, please let me know and I'll try not to do it again.

[Alug] online services in Norwich question 36 messages

Joss Winn will be coming to UEA later this year and asked Norwich members to "advise me on a couple of things regarding networking and accomodation in the area. [...] can anybody tell me about the availability of cable or DSL in the area?"

Andrew Savory (ajs) confirmed that the old-fashioned modems are still common in the city: "It isn't available. According to NTL, it will be available in 'early 2001', 'Easter', 'May', 'June', and now 'later this year'. Don't hold your breath." He recommended an unlimited dial-up deal instead until the situation changes, while Jo Mitchell suggested ISDN. Adam Bower took this forwards by asking about using 128k ISDN on these deals, although no-one answered.

With ADSL supposed to be coming early next year, Martyn Drake helpfully pointed out that "I'll just bet whoever is offering ADSL services in the area will be using the USB Speedtouch modems. Mandrake 8.0 pretty much supports these straight out of the box"

Once again, the "MJR and David Freeman fireworks show" got into action. This time it was about BT's slow roll-out of ADSL with David's initial claim that "BT has the technologie and ability to role out ADSL to everyone, except it costs so much to do. OFTEL wont let us loss lead" getting the intolerant response from MJR that "BT is solely interested in screwing as much money as possible out of the current technologies (eg ISDN) before having to discount them when they introduce the superior DSL systems." From there it became an argument about whether it's the government or corporation's fault and whether the will of the people makes any difference in modern society.

Other network technology was explored, including ham radio ("you don't want to go there. [...] 9600 baud is considered fast. [...] Welcome to the twilight zone where valves are the vogue and your circuit looks like it's a particularly tricky plumbing problem." -- Bill Hill (wbh) ) and 802.11b wireless networking ("A group in ipswich considered building the SWAN, Suffok Wireless area network, we just need more people to make it worth while." -- David Freeman).

[Alug] basic routing/config prob for mail 26 messages

Jen spent a while on the list getting help in trying to figure out how to persuade her Linux box to play nicely with work's network. Once we'd helped her to get the right Debian packages installed (and pointed people at http://www.uk.debian.org/ for future searches), we made some progress in correcting some errors but Jen reported back 'No, I get "a record cannot be found"' before it mysteriously started working. Further investigation suggested that "problem was ignorance about how WINS and DNS work, probably. Did a crash course yesterday. I'll try and do a write-up."

The thread continued for a while after this success with points about firewalls and discussion of a newbie list again. John Woodard (BigJohn) summarised past discussions with "I don't think there is too much trafic on the main list to warrant a newbie list quite yet."

[Alug] ALUG Librarian stuff 16 messages, +3 in another thread

This thread continued with MJR (slef) casting aspersions on UML, while being enlightened by Neill Newman with the confirmation that "in some respects, UML, booch and the like are biased towards OO". UML was still seen as the right way forwards for the library design, as "it is impossible to design a system that is exactly righ the first time round", but to date, no design has been posted.

[Alug] ANNOUNCE: ALUG 2001.4 (End Of The Academic Year!) 7 messages, +8 in other threads

The final meeting announcement was posted, finally provoking protest that it was on Father's Day and would cause BJ to miss his first meeting ever. Sadly, it was too late to change.

Also, more details of the demonstrations planned for the event were given in responses from David Freeman (akula) and others.

[Alug] Usage Stats for anglian.lug.org.uk 6 messages

http://usage.alug.org.uk/ was announced by Martyn Drake, which was quickly followed by Ashley T Howes spotting "In June 2001 3.3% of visitors were using a BBC Micro" and Steve Fosdick (fozzy) correctly spotting that "The other possibility, of course, is that someone has a browser that lets the user configure the agent header (doesn't opera let you do that?), or a proxy server that can be made to falsify it." Some OT discussion of the feasibility of a BBC Micro web browser followed.

[Alug] MS Exchange Server 5 messages

Govind Chandra asked "if it is possible to query Exchange Server like POP3 or IMAP servers. Email is the only thing that I have to boot into windows for and use outlook." In general, even though this is possible, Bill Hill confirmed that it was likely to be a local sysadmin's decision not to allow it: "POP/IMAP/anything-useful is disabled by default as being a security risk. I just set it up to have all mail forwarded to somewhere with a more sane server!"