Mark Lutgen, 8/17/97 1:25PM, Greetings from MTN's Sysadmin 1
Mime-Version: 3.0 Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1997 13:25:52 -0600
To: All Monitor Readers
From: Mark M. Lutgen
Subject: To all users
If you've had a question with your Internet account in the last two months then you are sure to have spoken with MTN'S new Assistant System Administrator, Derrik Dyka. Derrik has been busy taking customer support calls as well as a large range of other system support work. Welcome Derrik!!
Greetings once again MTN Internet access users,
Well, it is time for a brief update on our Internet status. Things have been
going fairly smoothly for the last few months and we are working on several
really exciting projects. Before I tell you about them, let me first explain a slight problem we experienced with one of our servers, "Freedom".
It seems that on Monday, August 4 1997, we experienced some problems with our primary hard drive. Unfortunately, this is the drive that contains all of the necessary information and software for our users to connect to our service. It went down around noon and we had it back up and running by 7:15 p.m. The problem is being fixed and we are working on redundant systems and backup systems so that, in the future, our down time will be minimized even more. This outage was not related to the upgrades we recently performed on our servers and I am happy to say that the upgrades are operating smoothly. I will continue to work on the system - incorporating as much redundancy as possible to minimize our down-time if anything should happen in the future. Hopefully, all of the work on our systems I can do at night to minimize your inconvenience. I am sorry about the outage but the good news is that there was no data loss just loss of access to our system for roughly one fourth of a day.
Now, on to more pleasant things. You may notice a new look to our web site. As are all web sites, it is a work-in-progress - however we are adding as much help info as possible for your convenience. I know that getting a response out of our help line and even some of our staff can be a bit difficult at times so we are working hard on adding as much useful info as possible. This new look is not just limited to our help files but actually both the video and Internet side are trying to make use of the web site as much as possible. Our cable programming schedule, Internet and video class lists, and quarterly Newsletter are receiving renewed attention by our staff. Hopefully, we will start making more effective use of our media to keep the world informed about who we are and what we are doing. If you have any suggestions, hop on to our web site and let us know what you would like to see or what you think would be beneficial to all.
Also, we have been adding on to our Internet classroom, a.k.a. Cyberspace. We now have 8 Pentiums and 2 Powermacs on Ethernet which we use for instruction. This is a considerable upgrade however it was very necessary. We did have two old 386 machines and 2 slightly newer 486 PCs; out with the old and in with the new. The 386 and 486 machines are still around and in use but it is much nicer to train on fast machines with nice color monitors. Hopefully, this will help out our Internet classes a great deal. If nothing else, I had a lot of fun putting them together. ;-) Check out our class schedule at:
http://www.mtn.org/internet/inet-class.html
Life on the Internet side of MTN has been great and we have been working hard on combining the video portion of MTN with our side. It often seemed like I came to work at a place that had a lot of very cool video equipment and cable channels but that my job was completely unrelated to that side. Well, in fact, the two are very related and we are constantly working on ways to come even closer together. The first thing I can mention is that we no longer use the name "The River Project". We are Minneapolis Telecommunications Network, Internet Access. It makes a lot of sense to get away from the name, The River Project. Firstly, with more than 800 users, we are no longer a project. A project is usually temporary and we are very much here to stay. Also, the T in MTN says it all. The internet is part of telecommunications, as is public access cable. MTN offers both Public Access Cable and Internet for Non-profit and civic organizations. Essentially, we are a telecommunications network at the service of the community so why confuse things with a different and unrelated name.
There are great things happening here at MTN and I will try to keep you all better informed. Keep watching our web site for the latest news and events.
Thanks much to all of you for your patience and patronage.
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