Alachua FreeNet News and Announcements January 12, 2006 AFN went off the air briefly this morning. UF CNS needed the floorspace on which most of the AFN servers were sitting, so the servers were shut down, moved, and brought back up. In the next few weeks, several AFN services will be migrated to newer server hardware, which will result in several short downtimes as individual functions (ftp, www, telnet/ssh, etc.) are cut over. January 29, 2004 As discussed in the previous two announcements, user accounts with more than 10MB of mail in the shared inbox had their inbox file moved to their local mail folder. This process is repeated as needed when the shared inbox fills to capacity. Special inbox files moved to the local mail folder are subject to deletion after 30 days. This is necessary in order to provide space for later mail. June 11, 2003 We continue to have serious disk space problems due to spam e-mail, much of it due to accounts that have been abandoned. The shared inbox fills, files larger than 12MB are moved to the users' mail folder (see announcement for August 2 below describing the process), and the shared inbox fills again. Eventually, the main AFN home directory disk system fills, requiring deletion of older moved inbox files. Today all such special inbox files older than six months were deleted, including inbox021202 for December 2, 2002. This does not impact any folder you've created yourself, only those special mail files moved due to exceeding the inbox quota. If you want to save e-mail, don't leave it in your inbox; move it to another mail folder or your local machine. You may also access the mail messages in the special inbox folders, see the message below for more information. August 2, 2002 IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT! See announcement below for May 1, 2002. Due to the inbox mail disk (/var/spool/mail) shared by everyone becoming full, e-mail inbox quotas have been established. Anyone having an inbox larger than 16MB has had their inbox moved to their home directory mail folder with the name inbox020729. This is a manual process now, and a smaller quota will be established in the future; 10MB has been proposed. For comparison, Netscape allows 5MB, MSN allows 2MB, AOL allows a total of 1000 new messages, and Tallahassee Freenet allows 0.5MB (500kB). Until an automated inbox control system can be implemented, oversize inboxes will be moved to your home directory mail folder with the name inboxYYMMDD, where YY is 2-digit year, MM is month,and DD is day. If this happens to you, YOUR INBOX MAIL ISN'T LOST. You can access the mail folder with any IMAP client. See http://www.afn.org/ht-free/mail.html for information about E-mail on AFN, especially the links for Remote Access and the Pine mail program. May 1, 2002 IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT! Due to an operating system disk failure, a drive had to be replaced. The only available drive was smaller, providing very limited space, which in turn caused problems with e-mail. The situation has been corrected temporarily, but the long-term solution will be to impose limits on storage per user. Quotas must be established, especially for a free service such as AFN. Until a fair quota on disk storage usage can be established, including e-mail inbox, Web pages, and other home directory files, there is no practical way to make the system stable and reliable, and no reason to provide for new accounts. Watch for more information to follow about e-mail inbox and other storage quotas. Implementation of e-mail quotas is scheduled for this month, May 2002. Note that paragraph 5 of the AFN Acceptable Use Policy agreement provides for storage quotas: see http://www.afn.org/ht-free/doc/setup-disclaimer.txt. November 26, 2001 Account creation is closed again, as the account creation program broke. We hope to have it back in service again soon. 31Aug01 Account creation is open again. For all of those people that have wanted an account for a really long time, you can finally create one. Please be aware that it will take a few days to create new accounts after you request them. Applications MUST have a valid local telephone number (Alachua County and surrounding community) for them to be processed. 23Aug01 Finally! E-mail and FTP services have been moved to the new server, and e-mail is working. However, we could never have *unlimited* space, so the procedure about moving mail files from the inbox to other folders still applies, as well as policy about e-mail more than 90 days old being subject to removal. 22Aug01 We continue to have serious e-mail handling problems due to space limitations. Work is underway to provide more space, but e-mail should be moved from the "inbox" to other IMAP folders or your local machine within a few days of receipt. E-mail MORE THAN 90 DAYS OLD MAY BE PURGED from the inbox. 10Aug01 Alachua FreeNet has been experiencing serious e-mail handling problems due to full disk. To allow the e-mail system to continue working while additional disk space can be added, *** ALL E-MAIL FILES OLDER THAN 180 DAYS WERE REMOVED ***. This applies only to those afn numbered accounts in which no e-mail had been received for that long. 15Sep00 Request for donations message sent out to all account holders. AFN needs additional funding for recurring phone line expenses. 08Sep00 Information about setting up Netscape as e-mail client added to several menus, see: http://www.afn.org/Netscapemail.html 01Sep00 Information about setting up the ".forward" file to forward e-mail from AFN to other mail servers added to several menus, see: http://www.afn.org/AFNforwarding.html 04Dec99 Maintanace was performed. A brand new 18Gb disk was installed. The disk upgrade was performed to add more users and to handle a much larger amount of mail. 13Jul99 There has been an update to the directions for Windows 3.1x users and MacOS users at the following web page: http://www.afn.org/ppp If you are having problems getting online with Windows 3.1x or Mac then please read over those directions. 11Jun99 The new terminal server is up for testing. Please see the following web page for information on how to setup your computer to dialup to the new terminal server: http://www.afn.org/ppp 17May99 The upgrade went smooth last night but I have had to turn off FTP temporarily. FTP will be restored later on this afternoon. 05May99 There will be downtime on Sunday May 6 from 2 AM until 8AM. The file server is getting an upgrade and therefore all the home directories have to be moved. 03Apr99 New features and function coming soon. New, faster (up to 56K) modems will be added to all lines. Freenet machines are being updated. This may cause some brief periods of being out of service. 24Feb99 The new mail server is up and running. You should be able to see some improvements. For those that read their mail using pine, you will need to enter in your username and password, for now. ============================================================================== * NEWS! Check out the "news" menu (type news at any menu prompt) for details on news and announcements. * HELP! Please read the documentation in the "help" menu (type help at any menu prompt) before reporting problems or asking questions. Otherwise: email help@afn.org or call FRE-ENET (373-3638).