Status of the Network Jan 2009

Happy New Year

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2008 in review

The most recent issue and one that continues to be the biggest headache is Email vs SPAM. The Bad Guys continue thinking up new ways to infect your computers and send you ads about improving the size of things or selling you junk. And -- the good guys find new ways to make sending things across the internet harder for the Bad Guys , which sometimes makes it hard for other Good Guys to get email into other Good Guys networks. Just such a situation came up just before Christmas resulting in many of your emails not getting thru the Firewalls and Spam filters of some mail servers. Finally we today ( Jan 07 ) replaced our mail server causing interruption of inbound and outbound mail for most of the day. We now have to go back to many other mail server administrators and request our mail server be removed from their Spam block list. Bill Gates has a solution for all this which will only cost you a few cents per each email for some sort of central clearing house. This is not well recieved by those who feel the internet and email should be totally free. Other people are looking for reasons to further control the internet.

Earlier this year we began a routing project . This was done to change our fully bridged network( using learning bridges ) to a fully routed network. There were a lot of interruptions during this period , which cleared up when the project was finished and the network was operating fully routed, meaning that every radio in the network is specifically addressed by physical location so traffic only flows to that radio and not to other parts of the network.

In the last quarter of this past year we installed a fully automatic backup power generator ( propane powered ) at our main network hub building . This is where all the final routers and connections to the internet come together. We also upgraded from a 6 Meg path to the internet over to a 10 Meg path.

Finally, I am passionate about defending the Constitution and restoring the proper relation of the government to We the People of the nation. So feel free to email me and we can develop some email community of local support for freedom, liberty, and personal rights.