Executive Director's Report =========================== 08 July 1997 By Christopher L. Cope execdir@freenet.carleton.ca) Contents: 1. Funding and Public Relations Update 2. NCF Administration 3. Member Services and Future Initiatives 1. Funding Update ================= a) Cash Received in June ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ $2,512.50 New Registrants: 128 individual donations (including 31 separate from registration) plus 5 PFAs donations separate from registration $8,486.51 Renewals (413 donations plus 5 PFA renewals) $700.00 Connection Sponsors (K.P.M.G.) $53.00 Boutique $30.00 Auction $107.21 U.S. Exchange (gain) -------------------------------------- $11,889.22 Total Deposit b) Membership Activity: Renewals ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The last of the "1st notices" went out mid May. 2nd, 3rd and final notices continued to be sent out throughout the month of June. As in previous months, members tended to renew within the first two weeks of their receipt of the 1st notice and accordingly, donations dropped sharply compared to previous months. The first wave of non-renewing members totalling 20,361 accounts were archived in June. As of June 30, 1997, pre archival was running on accounts 140 days past due. The ramping down started at 168 days on June 3rd and we will reach the planned 120 day target by approximately July 7th or 8th. Renewal Data for 8 months: November 1996 to June 1997 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- % of % of. Cum.% Rec'd Sent Donors/ Sent Rec'd Donors Donors Donors Tot Sent Tot/Don Budget Avg Don Nov. 6,155 213 141 66% 3.5% 3.5% $3,063 $5,000 $21.72 Dec. 8,560 1,065 666 63% 12.4% 8.7% $15,373 $7,000 $23.08 Jan. 8,219 1,277 1,136 89% 15.5% 11.1% $24,278 $31,000 $21.37 Feb. 7,846 2,331 1,495 64% 29.7% 15.9% $33,163 $31,000 $22.18 Mar. 8,889 2,190 1,659 76% 24.7% 20.5% $31,229 $31,000 $18.82 Apr. 7,817 2,217 1,437 65% 28.4% 20.5% $31,738 $31,000 $22.01 May. 3,079 1,831 1,266 69% 41.1% 21.9% $25,888 $31,000 $20.45 Jun. 793 654 418 64% 52.7% 16.0% $8,457 $16,250* $19.97 ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~ 51,358 11,778 8,218 70% * The Registration budget for June is $22,250. The amount anticipated for "new" registrants is $6,000 resulting in a budget amount of $16,250 for Renewals. c) Organizational Accounts ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There were no new organizational accounts during the month of June. d) June Connection Sponsors ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We received one connection sponsorship in June: K.P.M.G. Peat Marwick Thorne renewed their sponsorship for a year. e) Government Grants ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Trillium Foundation confirmed having received our grant submission. We are optimistic that our $23,500 request for On-line Job Search Training will be looked on favorably as it would appear to be in keeping with the Foundation's mandate. f) Visits to Key Partners ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ During the month of June, all Key Partners were contacted and where possible, a visit was arranged with Jeff Bossert, Lisa Donnelly and Chris Cope attending. A package was presented to each Key Partner which included a letter thanking them for their support, an NCF plaque, a specially prepared hard copy of Free News, and our Hardware/Software wish list. The following gives details of these visits: Fulcrum Technologies Inc.: We met with David Keys (V.P. Corporate Dev.) on June 9. Keys confirmed that their CEO, Eric Goodman and their CFO, Mike Kazmetsky continued in their support of NCF. In a follow up, Keys indicated that he had spoken to Goodwin about "trying to pry loose some equipment", and that they would be able to do so in the September time frame. They have in mind a work station and one or two unix servers which they will be retiring. Ingenia Corporation: We met with Tyler Burns (V.P. Marketing & Sales) on June 9. The meeting short, but Burns indicated a willingness to continue the dialogue. Gandalf Canada Limited: We met with Rob Kilroy (Director of Channel & Corp. Sales Canada). Kilroy was enthusiastic about NCF support, but current events would place such activities on hold. Dantek Computers: We met with Mark LaFramboise, Barry Williams and Earl Mathews at the opening of the ERAC at West Ottawa OPL. At this event, Dave Sutherland presented NCF plaques to Dantek, OPL and Microsoft Corporation. Mathews proposed a follow up discussion with Williams or LaFramboise. Ottawa Public Library (OPL): Barbara Clubb (Chief Librarian) accepted our recognition award (NCF plaque) in the presentation noted above. We were able to chat also with several other key OPL representatives including Stephen Toy (Head of Computer Systems), Barbara Herd (Director of Branch & Youth Services), Linnie Kalloo (Director of Automated Services), Patrick Hunt and Rheal Doucette (Graphic Designer) Subsequent to this presentation. Oracle Corporation: We met with Kathryn Bowcott (Account Manager) and Andrea Holland (Sales Consultant) on June 12. Oracle agrees to provide us with an in-kind donation of their latest version of their database product and Ms. Holland indicated her willingness to personally volunteer to assist with our implementation. Sun Microsystems: We met with Patricia Wing (Market Development Manager) and Khaled Wakid (Systems Engineer) on June 12. Ms.Wing will ask one of their systems people to come out and determine what is the best fit to help us. She noted that they were just in to their new fiscal year and that any activity from them would likely not occur until September. Microsoft Canada Inc.: In addition to our plaque presentation to Bob Tuttle (Regional Sales Manager) at the ERAC opening noted above, we met with Charlie Pulfer (OCU Account Manager) on June 12. Pulfer indicated continuing support for NCF. Microsoft previous donation of software etc. for our auction netted over $5,000. Hardware Canada Computing: We met with Mac Brown (CEO) and Michael Mansfield (President) on June 12. Brown and Mansfield continue to support NCF and promised to review our wish list to determine an appropriate in-kind donation. Loran Technologies: We met with David Levy (President) on June 13. Levy indicated continued support of NCF but noted that they had a new product in the testing stage An in-kind gift to NCF would likely wait until they were actually shipping the new product. Netscape Communications Canada Inc.: We met with Barry Gauthier (Canadian Federal Government & Eastern Canada Sales) on June 17. Gauthier offered us what ever server upgrades we need as well as the Administrator's Kit for Navigator and Communicator, to allow us to create auto-install diskettes. Subsequent to this meeting, we were given the unpublished address to download the Admin. kit for Communicator. and we expect to obtain the version for Navigator shortly. Yannick Gravel is reviewing available upgrades for our server and will download and test those that are appropriate. Yannick will also download their catalogue server for possible use as a search engine. Once we have completed our evaluation, Gauthier will provide licensing documentation. Carleton University We met with Richard Van Loon (President) on June 18. Van Loon indicated his continuing support of NCF, although he professed to have limited knowledge of the specifics. He acknowledged the benefit to Carleton from the University's contribution to NCF. g) Public Relations Update ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The June issue of the NCF Newsletter "FreeNews" is now online (go freenews) and is also available on the Web at: http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/public-relations/ for the Web version. Ads were run in both Monitor and Ottawa Computes. This month's ads featured a special thank you message to our Key Partners. A meeting was held with Barry Rueger (CKCU-93.1 FM) to discuss CKCU's Contra arrangement (Connection Sponsorship - Org account for radio ads). Two ads were scripted by the PRT We are awaiting scheduling details. A new option has been added to the PR menu - "NCF and the Media:" The section is kicked off with the Ottawa Citizen's June 18 column by Susan Riley and rebuttal by Chris Cope (assisted by the PRT), published June 21. Our part in this exchange was initiated by Barbara Clubb of the OPL. (keeping our partnership tight). The former "Development Task Force" will be revived as a function of the PRT with additional members added. A mandate is presently being developed but will include marketing, promotion and outreach. h) Funding Administrivia ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The online list of donor files was updated to reflect all June donations. Thank You letters were sent to all donors. The Regional Cancer Centre expects to pay for their connection sponsorship ($700) by mid-July. Contact has been made with three more prospective connection sponsors: Goldberg, Shinder, Gardner & Kronick - Fisheries & Oceans and National Transportation Agency. We are waiting replies. 2. NCF Administration ======================= a) Network Upgrades ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The largest upgrade to date, was done on Wednesday, 4 June from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Freenet4 was upgraded to Solaris 2.5.1. The email subsystem was upgraded to sendmail 8.8.5 and patched to prevent relaying and to provide the necessary tools to block unsolicited commercial mail. Chain reaction effects of this upgrade included interruption of some services from the 4th to the 10th of June: PFA addresses were temporarily affected. Immediately after the upgrade, certain reply addresses added a number after the word freenet (e.g. freenet1) causing problems with some newsgroups and listserve postings which required confirmation of the poster's return address. We began testing the spam blocking function mid-June with a temporary list of known spam abusers. The Postmaster was equipped with the necessary access to assist the System Administrator to enable her to add to the "block List" to deal with mail bombs. During the second week of June a problem was encountered on the Gateway (filter) machine. That problem caused difficulties with members using PPP. Under some unusual conditions, the machine would set some host(modems) as unreachable and reject traffic to those IP addresses. This problem and related problems with the Pop mail server were corrected by reducing time-outs (arp). This problem is believed to be caused by IP address space probing. Such a potential probe has been discovered on campus: a misconfigured HP-SNMP manager looking for printer on the whole Internet. On June 25, the Gateway machine was connected directly to Carleton University, rather than via the Newbridge router. Now there is only one point of contact for filtering IP traffic. An incidental benefit of this network revamping is the isolation of a development machine "NG-DEV1" (the former filter machine), which will be used for development and testing of "Next Generation Freenet". A clean up of unused and/or unnecessary shell accounts was completed in June with 139 accounts deleted. Currently, 48 accounts have shell access. As of mid june, a new monitoring tool has been installed; It is configured to gather stats on modem usage. (number of ports in use). These statistics can be viewed at "http://gw.ncf.carleton.ca/mrtg/modem/" 3. Member Services =================== a) Spam Blocking ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A moderated newsgroup called ncf.admin.net-abuse will be created. This newsgroup will be accessed from a submenu of the Complaints menu. Andrew Nellis (bs904) has agreed to moderate the newsgroup as well as chair the "Spam Desk" which will include maintaining the menus, updating the current list of blocked mail sites, providing how-to information related to spam, pointers to WWW sites with spam info etc. Members will be encouraged to post both queries and reports about spam to this newsgroup. Our current list of blocked sites (test mode) is short and has been established primarily to cope on an as needed basis with recent mail bombs. As our spam-blocking system matures, we will implement a procedure which will continue to give the Sysadmin and Postmaster the capability of dealing with mail bombs and mail storms, but will also include a 3 stage process, initiated by the "Spam-Desk Chair", wherein sites will be blocked initially for 1 week, with appropriate messages sent to the sender's domain contact person. After this 1st week (which should provide reasonable time to deal with the problem) the site will be re-instated. On a repeat attack, the site will be blocked for 1 month and again re-instated. After the 3rd attack, the site will be blocked permanently. Currently the filter running on sendmail allows us to block both specific addresses and domains. Over the next several weeks, the filter will be upgraded to allow us to block relays (we now cannot be used as a relay) and to execute a return address authenticity check. b) Archiving of unrenewed accounts continues ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Archiving of unrenewed accounts continues. As of June 30th, prearchival was running on accounts 140 days past their renewal date. We will reach the planned 120 day target by mid-July. In June 20,361 accounts we archived. Of these, 18 have since asked for their accounts to be unarchived. We note that this group has a smaller than typical donation level with $152 for the group or $8.44 average. c) Progress with Auto-install Diskettes for PPP Connectivity ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Netscape has agreed to provide us the Administrator Kit for both Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator to run on both platforms: Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. To date, we have only been provided with the kit for Communicator. Our preference is to begin with Navigator and the work on Communicator will be put on hold until the auto-install Navigator disks are complete. Colin McFadyen has been waiting for this kit to complete the PC version of the auto-install diskettes. We hope to have the test version ready by early August. Andre Vellino has completed an auto-install version for the Mac. Help Desk Chair, Richard Bethall, is helping to test the application. Additional Mac testers are being sought. d) NCF Search Engine Still in Test Mode ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The search engine software, WebGlimpse, is still in test mode. Netscape has agreed to provide us their Catalogue Server and we have been given permission to download it from their website. The aggressive upgrade schedule in June (and early July) has prevented us from installing yet, but we plan to have it available for testing by the end of July. e) Guest access to Newsgroups ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Guest" account access to newsgroups has now been blocked. A sample group will be set up as a menu item under "go news". This sample group will be created by copying a variety of posts from a broad selection of groups (using "go random"). Guests (prospective members) logging on and exploring, will learn that NCF does in fact have newsgroups as an interesting source of information, but will have to become members to read or post to the groups themselves. This change will prevent exporting the ncf.* groups to other servers. f) NCF cooperated with Police ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In June, we assisted the Ottawa Police in their investigation and subsequent arrest of an individual who had been accused of uttering death threats to another NCF member via personal email and on IRC. The officers presented us with a warrant to obtain information regarding the accused and worked with Sheila Alder to confirm that he was in fact on line at the time of arrest. The accused member's account has been suspended together with several other accounts which he had been using. -- *** Christopher L. Cope, Executive Director *** National Capital Freenet / Libertel de la Capitale nationale voice (613) 820-8885 -or- fax (613) 820-3982