From admin@tlg.org Mon Mar 7 01:26:15 1994 Received: from localhost by fnord.tlg.org (8.3/wps.com-hackery) id BAA11664; Mon, 7 Mar 1994 01:25:08 -0800 From: tomj (Tom Jennings) Message-Id: <199403070925.BAA11664@tlg.org> Subject: TL status: March 1994 To: garden-list Date: Mon, 7 Mar 1994 01:25:07 -0800 (PST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 7201 Status: O THE LITTLE GARDEN (nearly) MONTHLY NEWS March, 1994 Trying to revive the idea of monthly membership mailings once again. We may have more new members now, since Nov93, than we had Little Garden in August. Once per month, on our about the first, I will mail out a membership contact list, this brief newsy thing you're reading, and hopefully soon, an IP map of TLG. On the latter, I have the data, but it's not in a usaable format yet. Patience, patience... Of note to older members, TLG has moved into a new phase of existence. It's not longer the lazy, loose net we once were. [Mar93: approx. 11 members; Sep93, 20 members; Mar94, 50 members.] I've got bills to pay on the order of $5K/mo, and money is tight this month -- this was predicted to be the crossover month, and it's come right on schedule. We've eaten all our cash, and monthly receivables exceed outgo. Yay! The bad news is, I have outstanding bills, still eating cash and income. As many of have experienced billing has been erratic and comes in waves. Infrastructure was hyper-critical these last few months, not just hardware build outs, but the new information structures that are now critical to TLG's operation (more on that below). I'll be doing billing once a week starting now. As you know TLG is designed to be low overhead, so that you're paying for what you want to get, not for beaurocratic friction. I think so far we've done that, and network reliability hasn't suffered too much (though parts some people's service was delayed while I got my act together here) during the build-up phase, and we're over all the buildouts. To promote our lean'n'mean structure, I'm going to add a few features to the billing process. (I will also document TLG's terms and conditions later this month; you'll get it via this list). First: * Pay net 10 days, and take a 5% discount. * Pay before you are invoiced, and take a 10% discount. Doesn't apply to past-due amounts. However, this month, any currently oustanding bill paid by 15 March may take 5% discount (ie. bills you have just received or are about to receive). Yup even past due ones. This once only! We have an advertisement in WIRED magazine, that's generating a decent amount of interest. Here's one for you looking for a way to make money from your IP connection: we're getting *lots* of people who want more than a dumb ole shell account, but have no need for a 24 hr/day connection. They run Macintosh or Windows, and want to use Eudora to get mail (stored on someone's hard drive) via POP, have a registered domain name (someone to do DNS for them), and occasionally run FTP amd other clients. Charge 'em flat rate per month up to N hours, $1-2 after that, make up diskette with Winsock/etc to give 'em, charge a $25 sighnup feed,. and offer extra features like a branch on a gopher server, and you'd have a lot of customers. I'd guess you could run 5:1 users/lines, or more. Would be just fine being local-calling-area only; most people just sit in once place anways. Make it cheap enough and everyon would be thrilled. NEWS: Pacific Bell just dropped their ADN 56K line prices. $50/mo base, $6/mile, install is $667. 56K DSU's can be had from John Harkin (jh@nbn.com) for $250.00 each; if you run BSDI 1.0/1.1, you can use an SDL COmm. Inc. N1 synchronous card, $495, and have *damn cheap* 56K! (Couple this with the above... hmm... maybe I'll do this myself!) TLG's NEW INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE In keeping with the low-overhead approach, we've come up with some pretty neat technical informatino for peotential new members to peruse. There are two major FAQs, a bunch of how-to's, and the basic brochure. It's all tied together with funny email addresses that produce an immediate, automated response, and the FTP and Web servers. If you haven't looked at it within the last week or two, please do so, especially if you're referring people to us; possibly the information has changed. The process works like this: * Write to info@tlg.org (The Little Garden) will get you the full list of TLG contact email addresses, and the basic prochure. These are: info@tlg.org A brochure and basic info. Anon. FTP: tlg.org modem-faq@tlg.org Modem-based service Frequently Asked Questions. ll-faq@tlg.org 56K/T1 service Frequently Asked Questions. order-form@tlg.org New service questionnaire admin@tlg.org Actual humans. Web: http://tlg.org/ * The FAQ addresses get you... * The order form is really a thinly disguised questionnaire, intended to filter out people who want something other than what we have to offer, and to let people know what they need to know. It pretty much assures you already know what you're (though previous IP experience is still uncommon, it happens) or what you need to go find out. Between it, and the FAQs, the "tell me about TLG" noie questions have dropped to near zero. Also flesh@wps.com (Randy Mills) converts messages left on the voice phone to email, and takes care of first-wave requests, and generally filters email so that I personally don't have to ahndle ever request for a datasheet. This has saved me a couple hours a day at least, and phone messages no longer get buried for more than a week. Some other changes: * All install costs have increased, and for 56K and T1 signifigantly simplified (we lumped things together instead of breaking them out confusingly). * Prices are effective immediately, though if someone says "but I was told it cost..." I'll honor it til the end of March. In fact, the install prices are probably still a bit low. Turns out, as TLG scaled up, the overhead (the inevitable...) scaled up -- faster. Some of you ahem experienced this directly as I worked out a new-install tracking scheme. TLG.ORG: The vast TLG digital empire (well, the info server, mailing lists, DNS, etc) currently reside on an ailing machine that I retired. Me, the king of ancient, cast-off hardware, imagine having to use a machine *I* no longer use! At the January meeting, a virtual hat was passed and collected $284 for a new disk drive (thanks everyone!) to replace the ancient drive. Well sometime in the next month, I'll be putting up a replacement machine, no speed demon mind you, it'll be the carcass of good old NOS3.TOAD.COM, plus a 340MB IDE drive. The current machine goes to sleep about once every two weeks inexplicably, probably related to bit rot on the ancient drive. REVERSE NAME-LOOKUPS: Applies only to TLG 140.174.xx.xx subnets doing their own primary DNS only: if you don't have reverse name lookup working already, even though you your database setup, let me know. We have a final, working system to point reverse-lookups to your site easily. Many have yet to be done. Member Contact List follows in separate mailing. -- The Little Garden, a San Francisco Bay Area Internetwork info@tlg.org A brochure and basic info. Anon. FTP: tlg.org modem-faq@tlg.org Modem-based service Frequently Asked Questions. ll-faq@tlg.org 56K/T1 service Frequently Asked Questions. order-form@tlg.org New service questionnaire admin@tlg.org Actual humans. Web: http://tlg.org/