The 515 exchange is a new local exchange for the Buffalo area and
the 513 exchange is a new local exchange for the Niagara County area.
December 1998
New SIG: Buffalo Friends of Folk Music jump word: 'folkmusic'. (12/10/1998)
News outage to be rescheduled
The planned downtime for the news server will be rescheduled for another
weekend. Please check back here for more information which will be
poster later on this week. (12/5/1998)
News Outage This Weekend (See above) (12/5-6)
Beginning Saturday morning December 5th. until Sunday afternoon Sept. 6th.
the news server will be unavailable. During this time period the news machine
will be undergoing an operating system upgrade.
We apologize for the inconvenience, however, this upgrade should improve
the stability and performance of the news server. (12/2/1998)
Statistics for November posted. (12/1/1998)
November 1998
As part of our continuing efforts to improve the efficiency of the
Free-Net, the email system will no longer accept email
greater than two megabytes (2MB) in size. Since this is beyond
the current disk limits of member accounts this change should
be transparent to members, however, it will help to preserve email
system resources by eliminating repeated delivery attempts that
can not succeed. (11/24/1998)
New SIG: Helen M. Randall Memorial Baptist Church jump word: 'randall'. (11/23/1998)
Don't forget to visit the Christmas
, Chanukah and
Kwanzaa pages! (11/23/1998)
In order to improve the efficiency of the email system we have introduced a
new policy that affects a tiny number of Buffalo Free-Net members who
meet all of the following 3 criterion:
(1) Exceeded their disk quota.
(2) Not logged in to their accounts for more than one month.
(3) Continue to receive voluminous amounts of email.
Email to these few problematic accounts, and only to those accounts,
will be returned to the sender with a message stating:
Sorry, this account has exceeded the allocated disk space for it
and can not receive email.
Members effected can start receiving new email again by reducing
their disk usage and choosing the link to set forwarding back to
their Free-Net account or elsewhere.
It is important to understand that most users who happen to exceed
their disk quota will continue to have their mail queued for
delivery for seven days before being bounced back to the sender. As
of this notice only five accounts are affected (we have delivered a
message to their INBOX and will do so for any others in the future).
As a result of this policy there has been a reduction of queued email
to one-quarter of its previous volume providing a more
efficient email system for all members.
(11/16/1998)
New SIG: Queen City Country Dancers jump word: 'jdance'. (11/7/1998)
Don't forget to visit the Thanksgiving
page! (11/6/1998)
Statistics for October posted. (11/5/1998)
October 1998
Don't forget to visit the Halloween
page! (10/16/1998)
The Buffalo Free-Net Gets a Major Facelift!
In a continuing effort to make the Buffalo Free-Net easier to use we have
restructured our web content and redesigned our main web pages.
The many "city buildings" which used to divide up our content are now
replaced by a much smaller number of content categories:
In the Community and Non-Profit area you will find web pages hosted by the
Buffalo Free-Net and others featuring a variety of special interest and
community oriented information.
In the Government area you will find resources related to or provided by
local, regional and national government entities.
In the Local and Regional area you will find content about the Western New
York area.
The About Us area contains valuable information about the Buffalo
Free-Net including the services we offer and the Buffalo Free-Net special
interest area.
You can Search the Buffalo Free-Net content;
Apply for a Buffalo Free-Net
account for your personal use or to host
your special interest or non-profit
organization's web pages; or find a personal Userpage of a Buffalo Free-Net
member.
We believe this new organization and modernized look will provide a more
intuitive and simple way for finding information on the Buffalo Free-Net for
both our members and our friends accessing our information via the World Wide
Web. (10/9/1998)
October 1998
Statistics for September posted. (10/2/1998)
September 1998
Free-Net gets more memory: we've added an additional 64 megabytes of RAM to
the freenet machine which has resulted in immediate improvements in
performance. Both the news and mail servers also received memory upgrades.
(9/30/1998)
Dial-In users get a new frontend for simpler and faster navigation of the
Free-Net! Learn more about the new
design.
(9/28/1998)
Visit the Labor Day page. (9/5/1998)
Statistics for August posted. (9/2/1998)
August 1998
The Buffalo Free-Net recently experienced a major hardware problem. A failure of the freenet's boot disk rendered the machine inoperative until a new loaner disk could be installed and the file system repopulated. At the same time the operating system was upgraded to increase stability and performance. All user and SIG files were preserved intact. Some minor problems may still be encountered and will be dealt with as soon as possible.
We apologize to our users and information providers for the downtime and inconvenience this hardware failure caused. It is however worth noting that the Buffalo Free-Net is almost 100% supported by voluntary tax-deductible donations from its users. While this particular failure could not be anticipated, our equipment is old and underpowered and in need of replacement. We have concerns over both the news and mail servers in particular. Your donations are needed to help assist us into the coming years to serve you as Western New York's only free community access service.
The donations to date have been used to pay for telephone line costs (nearly $10k/year), seventeen new professional grade modems and on order and waiting for delivery additional memory for all the current machines to enhance performance and, coincidentally, additional disk space.
We ask those that are able to please consider making a donation to the Buffalo Free-Net at this time. The future of the Free-Net remains partly in you hands.
Send your tax deductible contributions to
Buffalo Free-Net/WNYLRC
4455 Genesee Street
P.O. Box 400
Buffalo, NY 14225-0400
Please note your userid on your cheques so we may properly thank you.
For your convenience, you can find a donation form suitable for printing here.
Thank you for your continuing support of the Buffalo Free-Net! (8/31/1998)
Known Remaining Problems
- ftp server not available (FIXED)
- Can't change password (FIXED)
- vt102 teminal emulation setting not supported
Please report any additional problems to bfn@bfn.org
Statistics for July posted. (8/3/1998)
July 1998
New SIG: Busti-Lakewood Recreation Commission jump word: 'blrp'. (7/14)
New SIG: Buffalo Chapter of the National Organization of Women jump word: 'bcnow'. (7/14)
July 1998
Statistics for June posted. (7/1/1998)
June 1998
There[A is a scheduled power outage for the morning hours of 6/23/1998.
As a precaution, the machines in the Computing Center will be powered
down about 10pm on 6/22/1998 and will be powered back up about 10am
on 6/23/1998. (6/18/1998)
Please be advised that the Buffalo Free-Net machines will be unavailable
during that time. (6/16/1998)
Statistics for May posted. (6/1/1998)
May 1998
Celebrate Father's Day with the
Holiday pages. (5/31/1998)
Statistics for April posted. (5/1/1998)
April 1998
Celebrate Mother's Day with the
Holiday pages. (4/5/1998)
Statistics for March posted. (4/2/1998)
March 1998
Statistics for February posted. (3/2/1998)
The web browser tutorial Introduction to the Buffalo Free-Net Interface
has been updated to reflect the changes and new features in the current version
of the web browser. (3/1/1998)
February 1998
Web browser upgraded to version 2.7.2. See a summary of
what's new in this version. (2/16/1998)
Statistics for January posted. (2/2/1998)
January 1998
Celebrate Purim on the Buffalo Free-Net Holiday Pages (1/24/1998)
Looking for information about WNY government or services? See the
expanded WNY Information page. (1/17/1998)
Statistics for December posted. (1/5/1998)