October 1996 Issue

OCTOBER 1996 NEWS@SYIX

WELCOME!!!

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*          News @ SYIX              *
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October 3, 1996           Vol 2 No. 7

WELCOME!!!

     First, let me, as usual, welcome all the new people to SYIX, we are
still experiencing massive growth, for example, we are increasing membership
at, get this, over 15% growth PER MONTH.  And when you have over 500
members, thats big growth!

HTMLized version....

     There is a HTML version of this newsletter, so you don't have to find
your way around all the tags here (although they all work in Eudora Pro and
Netscape as is).  Check it at http://www.syix.com/syixnews/

NEW PERSON AT SYIX!

     We would like you all to welcome our newest member of the SYIX team,
his name is Skip Smith, he has been a member with us for quite some time
now, and he is our new marketing man!  Skip will assist new members, develop
corporate programs, setup store displays, and generally try even harder to
make SYIX the first thing people think of when they think of Internet
Access!  Send Skip some e-mail at ssmith@syix.com and welcome him to the fold!

SYIX UPDATES...

     On the hardware front, we added a Cisco 2501 as our primary router, we
were slowly overloading the Livingston Router, and it was showing in
transfer rates on the server, so now we are at full speed again, running at
around 100X faster than our fastest modem, we have plenty of capacity to
serve you!  We also ordered 10 more modems, another Livingston Terminal
Server, and a 5 port BRI interface to support ISDN even better.  That will
put us at 70 incoming modem lines, and 5 incoming ISDN lines, more than
enough to support all you need to do on the Net!  These lines should be
active in a week or so.

TEAM SYIX...

     I am putting together a team of local professionals that you and I can
trust for our computer needs, consisting of Computer Sales, Consultants,
HTML Page designers, and others in the Computer Field that concentrate on
OUR community.  We are going to be calling them (all combined) TEAM SYIX!
And the website will be online soon (as soon as the details are worked out
on all parts of this.)  They are all established businesses that SYIX has
worked with, concentrating on servicing customers and clients in the Yuba
City/Marysville area.  Watch for TEAM SYIX!

PERFORMANCE TESTING....

     I wanted to talk a bit about system performance, and what you should
see when you use your modem connection to SYIX.  I have created a bit of a
chart below, relating to different things you do online and how they should
work.  Starting with hardware...  All tests were done using a PC with a
486DX4-100 with 16M of RAM, using Windows 95 with its internal Winsock, a
Boca 28.8 modem, connected from my home, usually at 26.4 or 28.8 depending
on the mood of the phone company.  (mornings give me 28.8, afternoons I get
26.4 or less, amazing how the pacbell lines effect the connection huh?)
Anyway, I choose some different sites, flushed my netscape cache, and
watched the "xfer" rate on different things as shown, and timed them all
with my wristwatch, all with Netscape Navigator 3.0, 32 bit version.  For
FTP I used CuteFTP v1.6, 32 bit version.

First test, web pages, from scratch, netscape running already, all caches
flushed, from the time I start loading the page to the time it grays out the
"stop" button (complete page loaded)  Then I hit the reload (to test system
speed, it barely uses the net to do that) and that will give us our actual
time to load off the net.

site name             first load        reload         actual network time

www.syix.com            20.66           4.92            15.74 seconds
altavista.digital.com   7.62            3.51            4.11
www.concourseast.org    27.05           5.01            22.04
www.yahoo.com           5.66            5.44            .22    (1)
www.internic.net        48.22           2.76            45.46
rs6000.adm.fau.edu/rinaldi/netiquette.html  34.93       24.96           9.97
www.sjmercury.com       32.40           4.86            27.54

(1) amazing when there are few graphics huh?

A few notes, I ignored obviously bad numbers, like once www.yahoo.com failed
to even appear, and I was going to do pathfinder's java page, but it refused
to answer.  The most critical numbers above are probably the reload times,
your machine determines the speed of the net more than you might think, if
you get much larger numbers than these, perhaps its time for more RAM?  If
your network times are much greater than this, then you have a modem
problem, or a configuration problem that needs to be looked at.  This was a
VERY unscientific test, I have 2 other TCP/IP applications running at the
same time (mail and a system monitor) that is also using some of the
bandwidth of the modem, and used my watchs' stopwatch function, so a lot of
human error was in there too.  But it is consistant, since I probably made
the same amount of human error each time :-)

FTP....  using anonymous/dave@syix.com for the login, and like I said above,
using Cute FTP 1.6 and all default settings.  I used the numbers they showed
in the log, as the "time..." line.

site and filename
                   size    time    speed in K      speed in bytes
ftp.syix.com/pub/U32pb200.exe   (1)
                  221448   1:13      2.96K         3033 bytes
ftp.microsoft.com/msdownload/ieinstall/update.exe  (2)
                  452160   2:19      3.18K         3252bytes
ftp.mcafee.com/pub/antivirus/dat-9609.zip   (3)
                  346312   1:56      2.92K         2985bytes

(1) This is a locally grown product, by Tom Farnow, check it out!
(2) To Update your MSIE30 software
(3) The September Virus Data File for McAfee

Note the trends, MS is a fast server (or actually a lot of fast servers) and
runs clean and fast, but remember, they are occasionally REALLY bogged down,
so you might see different numbers.  I can't explain the speed difference
between them and ftp.syix.com, except to say, "I guess I had better look
into that".  McAfee is in the bay area someplace, and its NOT a real fast
server, but was running good today!  These are all compressed files,
uncompressed files will run MUCH faster, for instance....

ftp.syix.com/pub/windows95/mdmusrsp.inf
                  48339     :05       9.44K        9667bytes

This is because of data compression, I have my modem to computer speed set
at 115,200 baud, and it can compress data up to that speed, and as you can
tell, it almost hit 100,000 baud....(10 baud in a byte)  Web text pages also
run at near this speed, without all the graphics.  If you have any questions
about all this, or wonder why YOUR system never seems that fast, send me
some mail and I will get with you on the phone in the next few days and we
can get it worked out.  I also made some screen shots of my Win95 settings,
you can look at each and every screen that deals with Internet Access in
Win95 at         
                http://www.syix.com/support/win95inf.htm

FUN WITH NETSCAPE

  -or-

ABOUT ABOUT:URLS

Ever heard reference to an "about:URL"? They aren't really URLs, but if
entered as URLs (in the Open Location window, or directly into the Location
text box) they'll open a page with this information:

Type:                    To Get:
about:cache              Lists all files in disk cache
about:memory-cache       Lists all files in memory cache
about:image-cache        Lists all image files in cache
about:global             Lists all the places you've visited, and when

ABOUT:USELESS INFO

In addition to the pertinent information you can discover using the
about:URLs we showed you, there are a bunch of other sites you can access
using the About: command. Mostly, these commands will take you to pages
describing key players at Netscape. For starters, try these two:

about:mozilla
about:marca

If you enjoy those, check out ari, atotic, blythe, chouck, dmose, dp, ebina,
hagan, jeff, jg, jsw, jwz, karlton, kipp, mlm, montulli, mtoy, paquin, robm,
sharoni, terry, and timm.

WEBSITES ...

WEB REVIEW...

        Here is one of my used-to-be favorites, it went away briefly, but
has returned with a great October issue.  Check this one out regularly for
the background on the NET and what its all about!  This is a weekly
publication, out on Thursday, they will send you email on every new issue if
you register.

                        http://webreview.com/

DICTIONARY?

        That barely begins to describe this site, its not a single
dictionary, its a series of dictionaries in practically every single
language, and specific ones line a dictionary of legal terms and medical
terms.  Wow.  For Dick Harmon and I, we have an awesome resource!  And I am
sharing it with you now...

                http://www.bucknell.edu/~rbeard/diction.html

YAHOO...

        You have all used (or should use) Yahoo, its the best of the best in
search engines, giving you great ways to find things.  And if its not in
Yahoo, they even drop you into AltaVista to find it for you, can't beat
that!  What you might not know, they have lots of other features there, and
I just grabbed a few to show what you might be missing....

WEATHER from Yahoo, check this link!

        http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/Sacramento_CA_US.html

BUSINESS NEWS from Yahoo, very complete, and all in one place

        http://biz.yahoo.com/

YELLOW PAGES from Yahoo, for the entire US (new Oct 2) check this link!

http://yp.yahoo.com/yt.hm?FAM=yahoo&CMD=GEODB&SEC=geocode&uSUB=&GCT=&RS=2&NR
=10&AD3=Yuba+City%2C+CA

If you want just the first page of the YP, its here....

        http://yp.yahoo.com/yt.hm?FAM=yahoo&SEC=start&CMD=FILL

MY YAHOO, or actually Your Personal Yahoo, check this out!

        http://edit.my.yahoo.com/config/login

IMAGE SURF at Yahoo!  Thats right, search for images using thumbnails.  Not
very complete, but different!

        http://isurf.yahoo.com/

AND not exactly Yahoo, but it used to be, a link to Mapblast, from Vicinity
that used to be maps.yahoo.com (it still works, try it)

http://www.vicinity.com/cgi-bin/freemap?T=mapblast&C=-121.623625%2C39.124019
%2C20000%2C0%2C0&H=250&W=425&Usertext=229+Clark+Ave+%2F+Yuba+City%2C+CA+9599
1&L=3&I=Smallcross&I=SYIX.COM%21&I=-121.623625%2C39.124019

Once again, thanks for reading my little newsletter, I hope that you have
enjoyed it, and hope that it finds you well and happy.  If for any reason
you should have a question or comment about SYIX or this newsletter,
remember my email address!  dave@syix.com or if you are REAL lazy, just send
it to dave and I will get it.

Thanks!

Dave Overton

(oh yeah, the lines to make Oroville part of our local dialing area were
ordered today, for install within the week.  Unless something else goes
wrong....)
Dave Overton		Sutter Yuba Internet           http://www.syix.com/
Voice 916-751-8873                                         Fax 916-751-8871
The Internet Provider Serving Yuba/Sutter/Butte/Colusa Counties, California