Excel.Net, Inc. July 10, 1996
Newsletter #8
=============
It has been almost two months since the last newsletter was sent
out, so we decided to put together the latest information. Here are some
changes that you should be aware of:
1. We have two new employees working for us as many of you may have
already realized. Andy Fink, started with us on May 10, and works
during the days. Andy has a lot of previous sales experience and has
rapidly become very capable at handling technical issues relating to
Internet access. He is currently attending the University of Wisconsin -
Milwaukee for his teaching degree. Our second addition is Harold Biebel,
who already has his teaching degree. Harold is a retired school teacher
and has a large amount of Macintosh experience. In fact, prior to Harold
working in the office, he was already fielding most of the Macintosh
questions and helping with the installations. Finally, Shelly has
decided to work from the home and will not be involved in the day to day
activities of the business, beyond working with web pages. Therefore we
ask that all e-mail be sent to admin@excel.net for billing and
administrative questions, techsupport@excel.net for technical questions,
or macsupport@excel.net for macintosh specific questions.
2. With the added employees (and we anticipate adding another in the
evenings), we are able to expand the hours which somebody will be
available in the office. The new hours will be as follows:
Monday,Wednesday 12:00pm - 5:00pm and 7:00pm - 11:00pm
Tuesday,Thursday 8:00am - 5:00pm and 7:00pm - 11:00pm
Friday 9:00am - 5:00pm
Saturday 1:00pm - 5:00pm
In addition to the hours listed above, you will find that we are
around a lot of other times. Also, e-mail and voice mail are checked
frequently. Finally, anybody interested in working the evenings should
let us know in the near future.
3. Due to numerous customer requests and also to ease the
maintenance, we will be changing the web page storage policy. We will
now be allowing users to have access to their own web page area and
update it as frequently as needed. In addition to this you are no longer
limited to a single page although the 1MB of storage place restriction is
in place. To make your pages available to the rest of the world you will
need to create a directory on our UNIX machine named 'www' in your home
directory. I will give an example using myself: account lweidig. My
home directory is located at: /usr/home/lweidig, so my web directory
would be: /usr/home/lweidig/www. All files that are put in that
directory are available at the following URL within your web browser:
http://www.excel.net/~lweidig/
There is also a special trick which can be used. If the name of
your main page is either 'index.htm' or 'index.html', it will
automatically be loaded by using the URL above. Otherwise, it will be
necessary to add the page name to the end of it. As an example if my
page was named cool.htm the address would be:
http://www/excel.net/~lweidig/cool.htm
With this method there is no longer a limitation on what names
you would like to call your pages. One note, pages which begin to take
an excessive amount of hits, will either be automatically removed from
the system or you will be required to purchase a web page storage account.
To create this directory using the WS-FTP program you will need to login
and then press the 'MkDir' button. Fill in the directory name of 'www'.
Finally, the name after the '~' is your e-mail login, aliases which have
been assigned to your account will not work.
4. Due to the number of diskettes which we have begun to distribute,
we have purchased a disk duplicator. If anybody would like to use this
machine for a project of theirs, contact me and we can work out a pricing
arrangement based on the number of copies and time frame needed.
5. We are discussing putting a "White pages" directory on our web
site. However, some people have asked us to remove all references to
their name from our system. If you do not want to be included in the
directory when we get it going please send me a message at
techsupport@excel.net and let me know. Otherwise we will include the
following information: Name, Company (if applicable) and e-mail address.
6. With the unfortunate recent outages, we have come up with a method to
allow users to access the Internet, even while the main server is down.
Although we hope that this will not happen again, we have included
instructions below. This method will work if you are unable to get logged
in with your name/password and the main server is down. Basically, you
will need to make some changes to the configuration. These changes can be
made permanently and do not need to be undone. If and only if you cannot
log into our system and feel that there are problems on our end (we
usually try to leave a message on our voice mail if we are experiencing
difficulties), you will need to change the user name to: Puser, and the
password to: user. Once the system has been restored it will be
necessary to begin using your assigned user ID and password again. I have
outlined the changes for each of the common communication methods below:
Windows 95
==========
1. Go into the Control Panel, and open the Network control panel.
2. Highlight the TCP/IP line and select Properties.
3. Press the DNS Configuration tab at the top of the screen.
4. In the DNS Server Search Order enter 156.46.10.10 and press the Add
button.
5. Press the OK button of the TCP/IP Properties window.
6. Press OK from the Network window.
7. Restart the computer.
Trumpet Winsock
===============
1. Start the Trumpet Winsock program.
2. Go into the File/Setup menu.
3. In the Name Server field enter: 156.46.156.2 156.46.10.10
(make sure to put a space between the two addresses)
4. Press the OK button.
5. Close the program down and start it back up, the changes will be in
effect.
MacTCP
======
1. Go into the Control Panel menu and select MacTCP
2. Press the More... button
3. In the Domain Name Server Information add the following in the second
set of fields:
Domain IP Address
====== ==========
homer.alpha.net 156.46.10.10
4. Press the OK button.
5. Close the MacTCP control panel.
7. The following information was in the latest issue of PC World and
is important for Windows95 users. There appears to be a bug as follows:
Running Web Browsers, e-mail programs, and other apps that
use Windows sockets to communicate over the Internet for
several hours at a time can gradually decrease available
system memory, slowing down your Win95 system or even
causing it to crash. This memory leak becomes worse if
programs open and close multiple winsock connections.
The fix is:
A patch to the Windows 95 kernel corrects the winsock
problem. You can download krnlupd.exe from Microsoft's
Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/info/krnlupd.htm
8. We have found that the following settings will speed up the login
times for Windows95 users and appear to be the optimal settings for the
system:
First you will need to go into the Dial-Up Networking folder under
the "My Computer" icon and press the right mouse button on the Excel.Net
icon. Then select Properties from the popup menu which will appear. This
will bring up the settings window and there should be a General tab.
Unless you have configured Win95 to work with area codes we suggest that
you make sure this field is not filled in. Next, press the Server Type
button. This will bring up another window. Make sure that it is setup
with the following values:
Dial-Up Server: PPP: Windows95, Win NT 3.5, Internet
Advanced Options:
Log Onto Network Unchecked
Enable Soft Compress Checked
Require Encrypted Pass Unchecked
Allowed Network Protocols:
NetBEUI Unchecked
IPX/SPX Compatible Unchecked
TCP/IP Checked
Press the TCP/IP Settings button and make sure the following values are
filled in:
Server Assigned IP Address
Server Assigned Name Server addresses
Use IP Headed Compression Checked
Use default gateway Checked
Press the OK button on this Window and the Server Types window.
This should get you back to the General tab. Press the Configure button
which should bring up the setup window for the Modem. On the General
tab, make sure that the Maximum speed is set properly. This value can be
set to 4x the modem speed (ie. 14,400 = 57,600, 28,800 = 115,200), unless
you have a 2400 baud modem. Do not check the button which says 'Only
connect at this speed'. Next, press the Connection tab and then the Port
Settings... button. Set the Receive buffer to the second notch from the
left and the Send buffer to the third notch from the left. Press the OK
button. Press the Advanced button and make sure that Flow control is
checked and the the Hardware (RTS/CTS) option is selected. Press the OK
button. Finally, select the Options tab. Make sure that neither of the
options under the Connection control are filled in. Press the OK button,
and then press the OK button again on the General page.
Thank you for taking the time to look this over. If you have any
comments or suggestions for future newsletters please feel free to let us
know. We appreciate your business and hope that your Internet experience
is enjoyable.
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