The Year In Review. Here is a review of some of the important activities that occupied the technical staff and volunteers since the last Annual General Meeting.

· We put in a better request tracking system. The help desk receives hundreds of calls each week. Before the change, we relied on transcribing the calls by hand from the answering machine to a log book. Email sent to the help desk were not correlated to the voice calls, and we were not able to track the progress of a call beyond two weeks. Now, we use an open-source software package to log and track calls. Request logs are available on the web, allowing the help desk team to resolve requests even when a team member is away from the office. Help desk volunteers are trained on using the system before they start their shifts. We are able to track a complex request over its lifetime and to share the information between all team members as the request is being resolved.

· We installed a real-time monitor for the modem lines. Graphs showing the number of users and the traffic of our modem lines, updated every five minutes, are available on the web at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/mrtg. We use the graphs to gauge daily use and to note long-term trends.

· We increased the modem lines for community group users. We doubled the modem lines from 23 to 47 after noticing that group users were having difficulty making connections during the daytime between Monday and Friday.

· We started a new email address for logging abuse complaints. In response to an increased episode of complaints about abusive behaviour, we started to log and track messages sent to a new email address [email protected].

· We rebuilt the main server. We doubled the memory capacity, increased the hard drive capacity, and upgraded the software. The rebuild process took seven weeks to finish and was not smooth, as both our operating main server and the server being rebuilt were simultaneously hacked. In response, we had to start the rebuild all over again after the third week, and to complete it under an accelerated time frame. Another problem was one of the new hard drives on the server failed after only two months of operation. We had to quickly replace the failed drive and then to submit it to a local data recovery company. The data recovery process took a long time to complete, and we have only just made the recovered data available for users. See the special website at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/datarecovery.

· We installed a backup server. In response to losing the hard drive on the main server, we reviewed our backup procedures. One quick and easy improvement was to install a new backup server. Now, we use the backup server to make nightly backups of all system and user data. To reduce the congestion of the data transfer over the local area network, we schedule a backup cycle of user home directories over seven days. We make double use of the backup server: during the day, when the server is not doing backups, we use it to check the status of all services of the main server every five minutes and to send a message to the VCN pager in case one of the services doesn’t seem to be working.

· We rebuilt the news server. This server offers the Usenet news service and the secondary domain name server. We increased its memory capacity to the maximum limit and increased the hard drives so that the retention of news articles will increase from about three days to two weeks. In partnership with a community group called United Community Services Co-operative, we also started to host on this server a new application called QuickPlace, a web-based group collaboration tool. For more information, see http://www.ucscoop.com and http://www.quickplace.com. The quickplace tool can be reached at https://quickplace.vcn.bc.ca, but it is password protected at the moment.

· We installed a public Internet lab for showcasing open-source technology. In partnership with the Humanities 101 project, we helped to establish a new public learning lab in the Downtown Eastside. We used innovative open-source technology to showcase how donated 486 computers can be re-used as graphical workstations. We used Debian software and the efforts of the Linux Terminal Server Project to install an application server that serves Netscape Communicator and the StarOffice software package to a lab of 15 workstations. The lab is now open to the public during most days (the space at the particular location has been secured until the end of the year). For more information, see http://www.debian.org, http://www.ltsp.org, and http://www.sun.com/staroffice.

· We started to involve more technical volunteers. Indeed, most of the activities noted above involved one or more volunteers. Thanks go to: Richard Smith for making the initial suggestion of a request tracking system; Stefan Cioata for restoring the MRTG graphs after they were lost from the failed hard drive; Jason Currell, Ryan Hung, Alan Hodgson, and Josephine Chua for participating in the main server rebuild; Gerry Toon for discovering the hacking incident; Matthew Emmett for building the backup server; Steven Tieu for installing the monitoring service on the backup server; Jin Summer for helping to install the rebuilt news server; Lupko Mandic and Sally Luo for leading the volunteer team in building the Humanities 101 application server. Another contingent of new volunteers are now involved in content development projects. While their efforts are forthcoming, we’ll mention some of these projects in the next section of this report. The entry way for getting involved as a technical volunteer is read the information and fill in the online form at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/vcn/volunteer.

The Year Ahead. Here is a preview of some of the planned activities that will occupy the technical staff and volunteers in the year ahead.

· Upgrade the dial-in service. A high priority goal is to make the dial-in service more available. We’ll upgrade the speed of the regular user modems from 33.6Kbps to 56Kbps, and we’ll upgrade the firmware of all of our access routers to improve reliability. We’ll investigate how our currently segregated modem pools of 47+47+23 can function as a pool of 117 so that unused modems can be better allocated. We’ll review our weekly time limit, adjusting it or possibly removing it altogether. Finally, we’ll move the authentication server to its own computer so that a dial-in user can still browse the Internet if we take down our servers for preventative maintenance.

· Offer webmail accounts. Our traditional service package couples a mail account with dial-in service. We’ll offer a new type of account that will decouple the two services, so that a user who doesn’t need to get dial-in access will be able to send email using a new webmail program. In essence, we’ll provide a local alternative to a Yahoo or Hotmail account. We’ll design a new registration form so that getting one of these accounts won’t involve the lengthy and complex process of showing a picture ID and physically signing a user agreement.

· Install a mail filter to reduce spam and viruses. The basic research towards setting up a mail filter has been done, and in the new year, we’ll start to re-jig the mail server for filtering mail. We’ll first target easily recognizable virus attachments and then we’ll experiment with an assortment of filtering rules for recognizing spam.

· Rebuild the mail list service. The service currently involves managing about 100 mail lists. We anticipate this number to grow as we promote the service in the next year. We’ll replace the current system with something more modern and make a gateway between mail, newsgroups, and discussion boards. We’ll offer newsgroups and discussion boards as two alternative ways of having threaded discussions and ensure that whatever the primary choice, messages can still be gated to the other two alternatives. We’ll provide the mail list service with better password schemes, and we’ll possibly augment the service with some sort of encryption scheme.

· Integrate user registration database with membership database. Our goal here is to improve the user registration database of more than 8,000 accounts and integrate it with the user donation database of more than 15,000 transaction records. With such an integrated system, we’ll be able to store contact information in one place, enable each user to be able to view and edit their own database record, and enable a user to make online credit card transactions. We’ll also be able to send out much more accurate reminders for membership renewals. A volunteer team is actively engaged in this project.

· Offer dial-in and website statistics. We currently host about 400 webpages. We’ll setup a system whereby a community group can get periodic reports of hits and other statistics. At the same time, we’ll extend the effort to cover statistics of dial-in activities, so that users can gain a more complete picture of their use of services.

· Offer a community database server. We have started to offer a database service to a few community groups. Some of our own administrative functions, such as the request tracking system, already use an online database. We will install a new server to host these databases and we’ll make the service available to the community. The building of the new server has already begun. Moreover, we’ll organize our technical volunteers to be able to develop community content using the new server with a set of common guidelines to ensure that the content is protected and secured. One such project nearing completion is a community index database that will replace our current community index of more than 1600 links to local community resources and nonprofit groups. Another project that is underway is a directory of public access sites that are being set up in Greater Vancouver.

· Investigate a streaming service for public audio content. In the new year, we’ll take a look at developing an audio streaming server. At the moment, we have started discussions with two other community groups.

For more information on anyof the topics mentioned in this report,
send an email to [email protected].