We recently renewed the contracts with our upstream provider for our dialup lines and T1 circuits in Salem.

The circuits providing our dialup lines were upgraded from channelized T1 circuits to ISDN PRI circuits last year. The ISDN PRI circuits provide slightly faster line speeds than the channelized T1 circuits (64 Kbps vs 56 Kbps).

The T1 circuits that provide us with Internet access in Salem used to be terminated at Post

We are still shopping around for a data center to house the second generation of our H-sphere cluster, which is slated to be built by February 2005.

It is possible we will also move our current servers and dialup access lines to the data center, depending on the amount of rack space we are able to secure.

The contract with our tech support vendor will also be renewed this October.

Our server that supported subscriber's free web sites, marina.cove.com, is scheduled to be decommissioned.

Marina was first launched in June 1996 and has reliably served our customer's

personal web pages at no charge for over 8 years.

It is difficult to find replacement parts for a server that old, so we have decided to retire this old server.

If anyone still uses their free web pages on marina, please let us know so we can make arrangements to move your free web pages.

The migration to the new H-Sphere web hosting platform is now in full swing.

All of our web sites supported on Windows 2000 Advanced Servers will be fully moved

over by the end of the week.

The next web sites to migrate are the e-commerce sites.

We will then migrate all of the virtual mail accounts from our

covemail server to our new H-Sphere mail server.

Then all of the web sites supported by our Unix web servers will be migrated over, followed by the remainder of

the virtual mail accounts.

It will likely take us the next two months to complete the entire migration.

It was a busy month at the help desk!

Most calls were for setup information and instructions on how to receive email.

If you ever need help, please select tech support (Option 2) if you call our main office. This

will enable you to get our dialup access numbers, email settings or our toll-free help desk number.

Please remember, our help desk team is available to you 24 hours a day and the direct, toll free number is
877-221-2116.

This was a relatively quiet month on the network.

Our upstream providers reported no outages and our servers had no downtime.

As described in the above article, we are now working on migrating our web hosting

customers' sites and email over to the H-Sphere web hosting platform. This migration will continue to be the primary focus of our efforts over the next two months.

Don is busy building new servers for our H-Sphere cluster.

Are you pleased with our service? Do you know someone who is unhappy with their current Internet or On-line service?

Why not do them and yourself a favor?

Just recommend our service. If they subscribe, we'll give you a free month of access!

They will appreciate your advice and you'll save a little money.

Again this month, several subscribers are getting their access in September for free - just by referring new subscribers.

Everybody wins!