TIP NEWS

Iain Gould talks about New Tip News about news, and Andrew Clayton answers some FAQs.

This month, The Internet Project bought the DNEWS server for use by the membership. We have been trialing it for the past couple of months. We believed it to be a good system, and sent the cheque off (remember the concept of 'shareware'?). Despite some minor interruptions, it appears to have solved a great deal of the news back-log problem by only requesting newsgroups that TIP users want to read.

Previously, the news server tried to receive ALL newsgroups that our Service Provider had to give us. Now, we specifically request only those groups where there is a demand. If someone wants to subscribe to a news group, DNEWS requests it from up-stream. If no one is sampling a group for a certain period of time, it is dropped from the feed into TIP.

One point to note about this system is that if you are not really interested in a particular group, you should un-subscribe from that group. This stops DNEWS being fed essentially unwanted groups, and improves the response and service to others (as well as for the news groups that you really ARE interested in).

You may have noticed the occasional busy signal when trying to access TIP - especially weekday evenings. With over 2000 users, 48 modems sometimes isn't enough. Also, with up to 48 simultaneous connections to the wider Internet, our existing ISDN connection can be insufficient.

Without wanting to give away too much at this stage, the IPMC (and its supervisors, the committees of the PCUG and AUUG) are investigating options to both increase the number of dial-in lines, and increase the bandwidth to the super-hypeway.[sic]

There are quite a number of options open to us, but all of them cost money. We have a large subscriber base now, though, and hopefully a solution can be provided before too long.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Question:
How can I check how much time I have used?
Firstname.Lastname@pcug.org.au

Answer:
There are three ways to achieve this magic.

Method One

1. Dial up TIP from a comms program (Telix, Win3.1 Terminal, Hyperterminal, Cooee, Terminator, or whatever).
2. Choose the option: Connect Supreme
   Your will be presented with the Basic Access menu.
3. From this menu, select the option s
4. then the option td
   This will show you lots of information on two lines (shown below) including Basic Time remaining (399:45), and Advanced Time remaining (300:20) (I’m on my third lot of internet hours!)

The Time Used display:
                      Last On    Time Left       Time Used    Real Time Used
User    Type  Exp   Date  Used  Basic   Adv   Basic     Adv   Basic     Adv
dac      ADV 9707   960706 0:11 399:45 300:20 1208:03 1204:40 657:00 654:45

1. Connect to TIP as normal (using TCPMAN or Win95 native networking, or whatever)
2. If you’re using Windows 3.1 and the TIP software access kit, invoke QVTNET and then choose TERMINAL, then type in supreme (lower case only please) as the site to connect to, and you will be presented with a Unix LOGIN prompt. Put in your username and your password at the prompts, and you will be presented with the BASIC ACCESS MENU. Now go to step 3 in method 1.
3. If you’re using a Telnet program (like the one in Windows 95) enter the command ‘Telnet supreme, this should connect you to TIP, and prompt you to login. Login and then go to step 3 in method 1.

Method 3
Advanced Access Only

1. If you have a good Telnet program (i.e. NOT QVTNET’s Terminal) you can connect to supreme on port 5000.
2. You will be prompted for a username and password, enter this, and you will be told how many minutes of Advanced Access time you have remaining. This function doesn’t work from some Telnet clients.
3. If it doesn’t work, try one of the other solutions.

As usual, people should send questions to the help@pcug.org.au mailing list, or read the messages in the tip.help newsgroup.