- T H E - I N T E R N E T - E X P E R T S -

Message "Argo Info Bulletin 14-2-96"

Posted: 14th February 1996
Source: ArgoNet Technical Support
Tel   : Sales  (0500) 585 586
Email : support@argonet.co.uk

News Groups On the Way

Having had a meeting with our network partners, Pipex, yesterday we can announce that, finally, they have got around to approving our request for some Argo news groups. The exact names will be confirmed within 14 days but should be argonet.announce and argonet.acorn.voyager. We will let you know when these are active.

News Server News

We also had a long discussion with Pipex about the current inadequecy of the news server which has not improved over the last few weeks. The News server situation should now begin to improve - you should see a definite increase in speed in the short term in both the Voyager software (in 1.04) and from the server. In the longer term (about three months) a brand new scalable news server, costing in excess of £100,000, is being set-up that should prevent bottlenecks and allow for quick expansion if the pressure gets too great. There is also a rumour going around that we are quite well progressed with a much quicker news reader program with lots of bells and whistles written in-house by Jason to which we can simply say - 'No comment'! You should also see a clarification being posted by 'markt' from Pipex clearing up his 'misunderstanding' over our use of Pipex facilities - we can promise you that we have always had the right to use their services!

We realise that the unacceptable slowness of the news server has caused a number of you problems but others none at all (mainly because you don't use news!). It is difficult for us to check who this does and doesn't affect. We are therefore running an 'honesty box' compensation system - if you have used news and found it slow then we are happy to add a further months free access onto your subscription. To take up this offer please email accounts@argonet.co.uk confirming that you are a news user and that it has been a problem for you. We once again apologise for the current slowness of the server but we hope you can see that we are taking active steps to fix it.

New Voyager Version

We expect to release a new version of Voyager next week. Depending on how the programming goes this may either be an interim release or the full 1.04 version. Either way you'll have 1.04 pretty soon and we are already, of course, working on the next version and we'll bring you more news about this version in the future.

We Was Robbed!

We had the unfortunate pleasure of having our offices broken into late last week and all our machines ransacked for RAM and processors - obviously somebody heard that we now have an awful lot of RAM and chips! This didn't disrupt the network too much as our main servers are in London but it has temporarily taken out of service our SGI (as they stole all the RAM and the main processor!) and also all our support machines. These have now started coming back on-line and we must particularly thank Acorn for the incredible speed in which they had new machines on our doorstep. Because of this we have a few days back-log of support emails to catch up on but these are being dealt with at this moment and we should be back up to date by the weekend.

Of course if you happen to have anyone offering you some cheap Risc processors do let us know!!!

Education Support

Thanks to the many users that sent us information on how you could help us with our educational resource service - we are still sifting through all of them and we will try and get back in touch if we need any further details from you soon.