We made some changes and upgrades yesterday that effected service for about 2 and a half hours in the afternoon. We want to thank everyone for their patience while we installed new UPS hardware for our main Internet connection equipement as well as rearranged and recabled our servers in order to allow for better and faster access from one server terminal access computer. We have at least one additional customer server scheduled to be installed in the coming days and the changes recently made allows for easier access and maintenance to existing servers as well as the easier installation of additional servers in our limited amount of space.

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all our new customers to our service, especially those who have changed over from other local providers. As we promised, we are sure that you will enjoy your Internet experience much more while experiencing fewer problems than you were before making your change. We appreciate your new business as well as the continued support that we are receiving from our existing customers. Miami County Internet Onramp Inc continues to be your only locally owned and operated Internet Service Provider and you can rest assured that you will continue to receive personal and professional customer service.

Today we have been working on installing a new 18GB hard drive in our server to replace the 9GB hard drive used to store customer directories, such as home pages and e-mail prior to it being retrieved. We have noticed recently that, due to our growing number of customers, the smaller drive is filling up. This new hard drive will definitely more than take care of us for a long time to come.

We have added a new backup server to our network. In the event our main server goes down, we have our routers and terminal servers configured to automatically look at the backup server for authentication and DNS'ing. That means if our main server should go down for any reason, you can still log on to the Internet and browse web pages located on the Internet. We are not transferring customer files to the back up server, so pages we host will not be available during the time the main server is down. Sending e-mail by our customers will not be possible on the backup server, however incoming e-mail to customers will be distributed once the main server is back in service. We have had great success with our main server remaining in operation 99+% of the time and with that in mind, we have streamlined the backup server to perform as few duties as necessary.

Most viruses are sent via e-mail and as a result a lot of e-mail is being sent, received and returned as undeliverable. That is what has caused our server to crash twice in recent days. We are working on some programming to help prevent further problems. We suggest that you never open an attachment to a message from someone that you don't know or are not expecting to receive.

We continue to talk with Southwestern Bell about the schedule of DSL service becoming available in the Paola area. They still can not provide a date service can be expected. We also have no information about Sprint/Osawatomie or MOKAN Dial/Louisburg calling areas and any upgrade plans they may have.

We have been notified by Southwestern Bell Internet Services that a scheduled maintenance will take place Friday morning, August 20, 2001 starting at 2:00am through approximately 6:00am. This will cause an outage for the Kansas City area, including our services. As we have experienced with these types of maintenance, it could last shorter or longer than planned.

.....that personal computer ownership and online access have increased significantly since 1996? Of the households surveyed, over 63% of US households reported owning computers in January 2001. That is up from 40% in April 1996. Of those owning PC's, in January 2001 almost 57% were also online, up from only 12% in April 1996. However, this growth does show signs of leveling off. Source: National Family Opinion.

We have been experiencing continued growth in both our Paola and Louisburg service areas that would confirm the online growth reported by NFO. Along with our growth we have also seen customers leave us for the higher priced but higher speed cable access (where available) or other out-of-area dial-up services. Competition in the dial-up Internet market remains to be a very interesting aspect of the business. Not only is the availability to access the service important, but also the reliability of the service as well as the availability of the employees to help resolve customer issues concerning computer problems, connection issues and billing questions in a quick and friendly manner. Customer service is a very important aspect of our business and we will continue to assist our customers in any way that we can to help resolve their problem(s).

With our continued growth we have recently increased the number of dial-in lines in Louisburg to 168 and ordered an additional 23 lines to give us a total of 230 lines for Paola. It is hard to believe we started with only 8 lines in May of 1996, almost 5 years ago. How time flies when you are having fun. With the fun has also come the problems and learning how to solve those problems in the most efficient way to keep service up-to-date and at the peak of technology.

Not only has my newsletter been a little behind, but my Virus Warnings page has not received the attention it should have. Again, this was corrected today. I hope that you find it a useful source of information and I promise to be more up-to-date in the future.

This is not going to work very well for slower computers, modems and connections.....but you might find some fun here. Enjoy.