The Granite Newsletter

published November 2, 1997

Introduction

It's time for another edition of the Granite Newsletter. If you would like this newsletter e-mailed to you every month, send mail to webmistress@granite.mb.ca with newsletter as the subject line and we'll put you on the list. You don't have to be a Granite subscriber to get this newsletter. There will be lots of local information available here, as well as contributors from our local internet junkies, so subscribe today, or just check it out on the 'net at http://www.granite.mb.ca/newsletter.

Granite Partners With Escape

The big news this month has been Granite's new partnership with Escape Communications Corp. based in Winnipeg. This partnership will give access to all Granite clients to Escape's servers throughout Manitoba, including Winnipeg. If you travel for fun or pleasure and like to take your laptop along, contact us and we'll set up your roaming access for you. Check out our Rates and Services page to find out where you can roam. The partnership will also allow us to triple our bandwidth. Currently we are sharing bandwidth with the Agassiz and Whiteshell School Divisions. This has led to some pretty lame service during school hours. This month we will be supplying a separate line for the school. You will all notice a big difference between the hours of 9 AM and 4 PM. Check out the Network Manager's Report for further details on the changes.

The Halloween Contest!

And the winner is.......

We had two excellent competitors and the jury just couldn't make a decision. Bud Mager put in so much effort. I think he may have had images on every server in Manitoba!! Allan Simpson says it's his first try at this, but we don't believe a word of it. His humor took him to the top of the list. T-shirts will be going out to both of these worthy webmasters. Let us know what size you wear and where we should send it out to.

We hope everyone enjoyed their Halloween celebrations. The Pinawa kids didn't seem to mind sloshing in the rain one bit. If this was you're first year on-line, we hope you noticed that this particular holiday is well celebrated on the internet. This just goes to show you how seriously we all take ourselves.

Winter Arrives

All we can say here is that at least it waited until after Halloween for a change. We all new it was coming, didn't we. With the winter weather here, Granite is hoping the problems with the Whitemouth antennae will also be gone. The problem was the frost build up on the antennae knocked out service during the early morning hours after a wet snow. When the sun arrived, the problem disappeared. With 2 1/2 years of experience with the wireless network, this was the first major problem of this kind experienced. The problem resulted from the unusual type of snow fall. The problem was also experienced at the Lac du Bonnet dial-up, but this will disappear with the installation of a separate line into that location this month.

This is the skiing and snowmobiling season. If anyone out there has a good set of bookmarks to some good winter sports site, please share them with us. We'll share them in our next Newsletter.

More Changes at Granite

You all may have noticed this months usage report came a day late. Although you may not notice a difference, the new report has been updated for the sake of accuracy. From time to time some users get disconnected improperly or have the nerve to be logged on at month end (the stroke of midnight on the last day of the month). This causes the time logged for your use to be labelled inaccurate. The new usage report takes that inaccuracy into account and removes them from your time.

Do you find it annoying when you call the technical help-line three times in a row, only to get three different people? Do you have to explain your problem over and over again? The next time you call the help-line, please be patient while our techies ask you some basic questions about your system and software. They will be entering that information into a database, so whenever you call and whoever answers the telephone, they will have full information about your system, your past problems and what has already been tried to solve your problem. This database will help us deliver superior technical help to all of our customers.

Network Manager’s Report

The month of October was a relatively stable one. Very few outages where reported from Granite’s upstream provider (MBnet) and most of those were planned.

Granite also had two disruptions during the storms that started as rain and ended as snow. Ice built up on the antennas thus providing poor service to Lac du Bonnet and Whitemouth. Granite is in the process of redesigning its network to reduce this problem.

With the schools actively using their networks, the demand on Granite’s bandwidth has increased during the 9:00am to 4:00pm period. This problem is also being address with the new network design.

The Pinawa modem pool is still the busiest. Lac du Bonnet and Whitemouth are seeing similar use, but only about half the usage as Pinawa.

If you are dialing Pinawa and you receive a busy signal, you can try dialing the Lac du Bonnet modem pool. Again, this is being address in the network redesign.

November Upgrades/Maintenance

Granite is in the process of redesigning the network. Granite will be moving its main Internet feed, servers and Pinawa modem pool to Lac du Bonnet, and at the same time tripling its bandwidth. This upgrade and move will be taking place at the end of November. Although Granite will try to make the move transparent, some outages will occur. Granite will make every effort to minimize the outages. The Lac du Bonnet modem pool will be moved to the new location first, and this will cause the greatest problem. Granite is at the mercy of MTS. Hopefully, the outage will be less than 8 hours. This is plan to occur between November 24 - 28, 1997.

The consolidation of equipment will provide better service to Beausejour and Pine Falls and reduce the chances of busy signals as their will be 15 dailup lines in Lac du Bonnet.

Changes to client software will be minimal. At this point the only change should be the phone number.

More detailed information will be sent out as it becomes available.

Member Forum

Members - we need some interesting articles for this newsletter, and we know you're the one's who can write them. Write a short article for the next newsletter for us, send it to webmistress@granite.mb.ca with Newsletter Article as the subject matter and just maybe we'll put it in this section of our newsletter. The call right now is to all you Mac experts. What's on the net for Macs? Got any good tips for getting your Mac connected? We're looking forward to hearing from you all.

Check out our previous newsletters: