Volume 4 Issue 8

March, 1999

Maintenance Downtime Scheduled

We are scheduling a brief downtime for maintenance purposes on Sunday morning, March 21, between 10 am and noon. This downtime will allow us to complete a few new hardware changes.

Windows98 Demon Dialer

Several subscribers noticed recently that their computers were dialing into the Cove...by themselves!

It was quite a mystery. We had never heard of this happening to a computer running Windows (Macs used to do this, occasionally). The topic was even put up on our Community Bulletin Board.

One subscriber, mugs26, figured out the mystery. It was actually Internet Explorer that was making the Windows98 computers dial-up. Internet Explorer 4+ does this to automatically update your subscribed newsgroup. There is a way to turn off this perplexing feature.

Please refer to the Community Bulletin Board for further information.

Help Desk Notes

There’s been a run of help calls concerning bad passwords recently - the Caps Lock has been the culprit in most cases. Please remember to check your Caps Lock if you continually get challenged for your password when logging in or getting your mail.

We also received several calls for the phone numbers to the 56K modems. These numbers are:

Gloucester: 675-5900
Salem: 542-1100
We urge our subscribers who are new to using the Internet to spend a little time with our Help Section, located on our Main Page. In there, you will find several, very useful references on using browsers and email programs. There is also a very good tutorial site by Yahoo, called the Beginner’s Guide, which contains many interesting and informative links and pages.

The Help Section also has several good links to 56K sites, for those looking for information on KFLEX, X2 and V.90 technologies.

Anti-Spam Software

Spam, the high-tech version of junk mail, is rampant on the Internet. It is an annoyance to subscribers and a major waste of bandwidth and disk space on any network.

We have taken a proactive approach to preventing spam from reaching our subscribers.

Our network, like all networks, receives large amounts of spam every day. There is software installed on our mailserver that prevent most of this from reaching you.

Despite our efforts to eliminate most spam before it can be delivered to you, you still receive some spam - it’s inevitable.

You, too, can help eliminate spam. There are several software programs freely available for removing spam from your inbox. The Tucows website, linked on our Software Archives Page, contains anti-spam programs you can download for free.

New Subscriber Referral Promotion!

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

Why not do them, and yourself, a favor?

We are offering a New Subscriber Referral Promotion! Simply recommend our service to someone. If they decide to subscribe to our service, and tell us that you referred them, we will give you a free month of access!

They will appreciate your recommendation and you'll save a little money!

Yet again this month, over a dozen subscribers are getting their access in March for free - by referring new subscribers.

Everybody wins!

SysAdmin's Corner

We again enjoyed a relatively uneventful month in February, with no significant outages to report.

Our upstream providers had no significant outages to report.

Check the Internet Traffic Report at the bottom of the Internet Section of our website.

Internet Training

Until we can establish another classroom on Cape Ann, Cape Ann subscribers are invited to attend the Salem classes at half-price!

Classes will he held at our Salem facility in March on the 9th and 23rd and in April on the 13th and 27th.

What's New at the Cove is a monthly publication of Cove Communications.

Publisher, Bill Ostaski
Editor, John Trefry

27 Congress Street
Salem, MA 01970
(978) 741-5300
(978) 282-3399
office@cove.com

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