[Alpines] Spam, servers, service and such

[Mark J Bradakis]

I wrote this for another list, but there are possibly a few of you who
here who might want some advance warning of possible Team.Net
downtime.  I don't want to be the cause of even more hoilday panic!


Anyway, here's the message:


Yes, there are still some spam messages from hijacked email accounts
getting through now and then.  I've been working on the issue a bit,
but it is turning out to be a case of 'shipwright's disease' as we
know it, applied to computers.  If you don't know what I am talking
about, check out

http://www.team.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=32


Basically to tighten up security and improve a few things I'm planning
on updating the operating system and all the user level programs that
Team.Net uses.  Not a small undertaking, but well within my abilities.
Currently there is no budget for hardware upgrades, perhaps after the
spring fund drive.  Of course, if you haven't yet spent all your loot
on holiday gifts and such and wanted to donate [ link below ] I would
not complain ;-)

The process will take a fair bit of time over who knows how many late
nights at the keyboard.  With luck it will all be unnoticed by you
folks, transparent to the user, as they say.  But there is always a
chance of service not being available for some period of time,
hopefully no more than minutes at a time.  It could be something
simple, like a stupid typo in a config file, or it could be one of the
cats jumping the the keyboard as I go to fetch some more refrehments
and somehow managing to hit the CONFIRM REFORMAT OF ALL DISKS button.

 I remember what it was like when the ISP I was using for the DSL line
went belly up and Team.Net was off the air for 8 days - not a good
thing.  Actually, I wonder what the up vs. down time percentages might
be over the last 19 years and 7 months of Team.Net.  I won't count the
years before that when I ran it from the U of U.

Anyway, short story is if Team.Net disappears at times over the
next few weeks, don't panic, I'll be working on it.


mjb.