ROOTSWEB REVIEW: Genealogical Data Cooperative Weekly News Vol. 1, No. 2, 24 June 1998 Copyright (c) 1998 RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative Editors: Julia M. Case and Myra Vanderpool Gormley, CG ***************************************************************** RootsWeb Review is e-mailed on Wednesdays to all who make use of the resources provided by RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative. Last week some addresses on the mailing list received two copies of RWR as a result of a software problem (caused by a bounce from an incorrectly configured domain) that was caught and fixed early, but not before some damage already had been done. This kind of thing will happen from time to time. However, if you regularly receive two or more copies of RWR, it might result from more than one of your e-mail addresses being on the mailing list. If you receive more than one copy of RWR because you have more than one e-mail address, please unsubscribe from the list while logged on at the address you wish to have removed or write to let us know what your e-mail addresses are and which to remove. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of RootsWeb Review, please e-mail: RootsWeb-Review-L-request@rootsweb.com and put ONLY the word "unsubscribe" (omit the quotation marks) in the subject line and in the body of the message. ***************************************************************** CONTENTS: New This Week at RootsWeb; Free Web Space for Genealogy Societies; Connecting through RootsWeb; Year 2000 Bugs; Geek Speak; An (Almost) Unexpurgated History of RootsWeb; Mailing Lists and Web Pages; Backstage at RootsWeb: Excerpts from the Staff Diary; Tech Humor. ***************************************************************** NEW THIS WEEK AT ROOTSWEB: We've added two more newsfeeds to RootsWeb's news server, including one to France. The extra feeds mean that Usenet articles in the soc.genealogy.* newsgroups will flow more quickly and efficiently through our systems. It also means that the flow of genealogy Usenet traffic between the U.S. and Europe has improved a bit. Our goal is to make RootsWeb *the* central switching station for genealogy netnews articles in the world. We're especially interested in improving connectivity to Europe, Asia and Australia. ***************************************************************** FREE WEB SPACE FOR GENEALOGY SOCIETIES For "historical" and "fraternal/genealogical" groups RootsWeb provides *unlimited* free space, subject to three rules: o Upload no copyrighted material save with permission. o Upload no lineage-linked databases. o If goods, services, or memberships are sold through RootsWeb, RootsWeb expects a 5% honorarium. In particular, primary records are always welcome -- RootsWeb will provide as much space as needed for BDMs, tombstones, census records, etc. Family associations are treated the same as individuals, which means they must become RootsWeb Sponsors and space costs an additional $24 dollars per 25 MB block per year. Rules for family associations and individuals are: o Upload no copyrighted material save with permission. o Space may not be resold. o If goods, services, or memberships are sold through RootsWeb, RootsWeb expects a 5% honorarium. Lineage-linked databases are perfectly OK in paid accounts. IMPORTANT: At the moment RootsWeb IS creating "historical" and "fraternal/genealogical" accounts, but there is a temporary moratorium on family association/individual Web space. Once we're satisfied that we have homepages.rootsweb.com operating smoothly, then we'll begin offering family association and individual accounts again. Most of the genealogical societies currently hosted by RootsWeb are listed at ***************************************************************** CONNECTING THROUGH ROOTSWEB: Clare Peden Midgley, a USGenWeb Project county coordinator (Allegheny County, Pennsylvania and Cambria County, Pennsylvania , sent along this message, which recently was posted on the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania mailing list . "As part of my routine, I always look to see what names others are searching. About three weeks ago, I noticed a posting on BAXENDELL. The individual posting was David Baxendell from New Zealand. It turns out that that he is searching the same name as my uncle Howard Baxendell, and had a great deal of information to pass along to my Baxendell side of the family. The Baxendells here in the USA, were elated to find their missing relatives. THANK YOU, PAALLEGH." Lou Young, in CA * * * How many connections do you suppose are made through RootsWeb in an average month? When we asked Dr. Leverich that question, he responded: "For the Roots Surname List (RSL), we know that users of the database were looking up the e-mail address of the average submitter about seven times each month. Folding that into anecdotal evidence, I'd guess that the RSL brings the average submitter one or two new contacts each month. In total, that's probably 100,000 contacts made each month just by the RSL. "When you factor in the surname lists, the mailing lists, query boards, and all that other stuff, I'd estimate that 200,000 to 300,000 contacts are made each month at RootsWeb. These are only the contacts we *know* about -- the real number may be much higher." ***************************************************************** YEAR 2000 (Y2K) BUGS: "What happens to the RootsWeb system when the year 2000 hits? Will the system survive?," inquired RWR reader Mary Anne Fisher. Karen and Doc respond: "We use Linux (a dialect of Unix). Well-designed Unix software is *less* prone to Y2K bugs than Windows software. The systems definitely aren't going to explode or stop dead, though we may have a few hiccups." ***************************************************************** GEEK SPEAK: This week's entries are provided by Dale "Doc" Schneider, Sysadmin and guru of RootsWeb. PING is a program which sends a small packet of information to a server and returns it... with the time it takes to get there and return. POP3 = Post Office Protocol v3 It is how a person get their mail from their ISP to their mail software. SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol It is how a person sends their mail from their mail software to the internet. Ellen expanded on entry two above: POP (Post Office Protocol) is _one_ way of accessing your email from a service provider.If you use Eudora or Netscape Mail, for example, what you're usually doing is dialing your provider's POP server, querying a specific port on that server, and downloading your mail to your Mac or Windows PC -- all without ever actually logging in to an account on the provider. I log in directly, work interactively and read my mail directly from the spool, with Unix mail clients like 'mail' and 'mm'. People who use 'pine', a very popular Unix mailer, may be getting their mail via POP *or* directly from the spool, depending on local configuration. There are other protocols for remote access to email, too. Some providers have already moved ahead to IMAP (Interactive Mail Access Protocol) -- Eudora, Netscape, and pine are all IMAP-configurable. There are several other experimental protocols; these are described in the "LAN Mail Protocols Summary", posted regularly to comp.mail.misc and available at: ***************************************************************** AN (ALMOST) UNEXPURGATED HISTORY OF ROOTSWEB by Dr. Brian Leverich, Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative Long, long ago and in a *really* distant galaxy (about 1976 at Harvard), a young man was trying to finish a project on one of the old S-100 bus machines, whose power supply was overheating. His friends found him with his face and head fully buried in the machine's cabinet, alternately blowing on some heat sinks and sucking on the ceramic material encasing some big stabilizing resistors. This same pervert was also engaged in interconnecting computers in novel ways, doing something that was called "networking" in the academic journals but at that time looked more like a cybernetic group grope. Less long ago and in a less distant galaxy (about 1980 at the RAND Corporation), there were two newly married, recently escaped from graduate school folks who would read *every* post made to Usenet every day. On a vacation in 1986, Karen started looking for her grandfather's birthplace. She dragged Brian along for the search. That was the start of the addiction. Being thoroughgoing Internet geeks, K & B started hanging out in net.roots. Then Alf Christophersen launched the ROOTS-L mailing list in December 1987, and that was yet another place to hang out. Karen began maintenance of the Roots Surname List in 1989, when everything was done with file archives and such. By something like 1993, the Web had gotten started and Steven Woods had created the first Web-based search engine for the RSL. Shortly afterwards and largely to persuade RAND to let them dabble on the exploding Web using the corporate Web server, K and B and friends launched the RAND Genealogy Club. They created one of the earliest genealogy Websites, a site which grew so popular that it soon was generating significantly more traffic than the official corporate Website. In the Fall of 1995, K and B drove and camped their way up to Alaska with their German Shepherds. On the way back they decided they'd had enough of Los Angeles. Back at home, they sold their house in the suburbs and moved to a cabin on the North Slope of Mt. Pinos, 60 miles from the nearest wide spot on any road. Along with getting indoor plumbing, they had Pac Bell install a high-speed digital line. Moans from the telco's sales and engineering staffs were blithely ignored. About that same time RAND's management, whose obliviousness to the activities of the staff is legendary, was finally beginning to suspect something was not quite kosher on the Web server. Looking at the visitor counts, it was straining even management's credibility that that many people actually cared what RAND was. Sensing a problem in the making, K & B registered the name of RootsWeb.com and started serving the RSL and other genealogical material out of their mountainside cabin in February of 1996. They were amazed when a Dutch site spotlighted them and they got *3,000* hits in one day. In May of 1996 K & B got their first T1. A big day was 50,000 Web hits. While RootsWeb was getting started, Apple's eWorld was having difficulty hosting ROOTS-L and its sister lists. There was a major crash at eWorld in July of 1996, and RootsWeb began list serving for ROOTS-L. K & B consumed 197.3 gallons of coffee and 4.73 stomach linings moving ROOTS-L to our servers. RootsWeb began accepting voluntary contributions from its users at that point, because the costs were beginning to exceed what K & B could afford from their own pockets. In the Fall, Winter, and Spring of 1996-97 RootsWeb continued growing, adding support for the USGenWeb Archives and for many USGenWeb counties. RootsWeb discovered a call-girl ring was being operated out of one of the Websites it hosted in January, 1997. The Website was closed immediately, though there are unconfirmed reports that B archived the GIFs somewhere at RootsWeb. In May of 1997 RootsWeb adopted 1,000 Maiser mailing lists, after that server was destroyed by a spam attack from the sleazes at Atlanta's Benchmark Printing. Another 227.7 gallons of coffee were consumed and 6.38 stomach linings destroyed. At the same time the Maiser lists were settling in, RootsWeb had its final round of attacks by a cracker who had been breaking into its systems for months. Things culminated in a sort of surreal exchange of e-mail between the cracker and B, and that seems to have ended the problem. In August of 1997 RootsWeb adopted the dozen or so *large* lists still being served by eWorld. During the following Fall, Winter, and Spring RootsWeb continued to grow. February of 1998 brought the worst of the El Nino storms, and B spent most of one week living in a dark, unheated network operations center as he tended the generator that kept RootsWeb online. In April of 1998 Palladium Interactive, publisher of the extraordinary Ultimate Family Tree software, became the corporate sponsor of RootsWeb. Palladium's sponsorship enabled RootsWeb to continue to grow. The RootsWeb Review, edited by Julie Case and Myra Vanderpool Gormley, published its first edition on 17 June 1998. At present, RootsWeb hosts more than 2,700 Websites and 3,600 mailing lists. RootsWeb now has a dozen servers and five T1s worth of bandwidth, and handles more than 1,300,000 Web hits and 3,000,000 pieces of e-mail on a typical day. RootsWeb expects to be adding several more main servers and a sixth (and possibly seventh) T1 within the next few weeks. If you would like to help RootsWeb by becoming a member, sponsor, donor, or patron, please visit: ***************************************************************** MAILING LISTS AND WEB SITES: To subscribe or unsubscribe from any RootsWeb mailing list, send an e-mail message with only the word SUBSCRIBE (or UNSUBSCRIBE) in the subject and the body of the message to [name of list]-L-request@rootsweb.com (for mail mode) or to [name of list]-D-request@rootsweb.com (for digest mode). If you have an automatic signature file, please be sure to turn it off before you send the request. For example, if you wish to be removed from this mailing list, send your UNSUBSCRIBE message to: Rootsweb-Review-L-request@rootsweb.com NEW SURNAME MAILING LISTS RECENTLY CREATED ON ROOTSWEB: Bartlett-Roots (an alternate Bartlett mailing list) Cales Cassie Downing Fergus Fowler Gatewood Grenfell Haffey Koehler/Kohler Lay Lund McClurg McNeal Mattingly Scott (Clan Scott Society) VanLandingham/Vallandingham NEW COUNTY AND STATE GENEALOGICAL SOCIETIES AND GROUPS AT ROOTSWEB: AL--Lowndes County AZ--Paradise Valley Genealogy Project in Arizona GA--Madison County IA--Madison County LA--Louisiana USGenWeb discussion list; LAGenWeb Archive coordinators and volunteers MS--Jefferson Davis County; Montgomery County NC--North Carolina USGenWeb discussion list NJ--Morris County VA--Grayson County; Patrick County; Rockingham County WI--Marquette County WV--Calhoun County SPOTLIGHT ON WEB SITES FOUND ON ROOTSWEB: MAINE OLD CEMETERY ASSOCIATION, M.O.C.A. is dedicated to the preservation of Maine's neglected cemeteries. Among the group's active projects is preparing its county cemetery listings for publication. The York County Cemetery Records (a 2,976-page tome) is complete and offered for sale. The next set in this series will be Kennebec County. M.O.C.A. also publishes a quarterly newsletter for its members. At its meeting July 11 at Church of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Rangeley, Maine, the speaker will be Senator John Benoit whose topic will be "Maine Cemetery Laws." DOWNWARD BOUND: HELP FINDING YOUR ANCESTORS OF GREAT LAKES SHIPPING offers help regarding resources and material pertaining to ancestors who were involved with shipping on the Great Lakes -- the U.S. and Canada. Whether they owned or worked on a ship, were dock hands, shipyard workers, lighthouse keepers, U.S. Lifesaver, Coast Guard personnel or Merchant Marine, this is a good site to visit. There's an onsite search engine (if you have Java-capable browser) for the entire Downward Bound site for surnames, ship names and place names. This is another excellent site -- part of the USGenWeb project. ***************************************************************** BACKSTAGE AT ROOTSWEB: EXCERPTS FROM THE STAFF DIARY. 6/18/98 (B) No joy on the 5th T1. Battled traffic to make it to the wouldbe Redondo Beach NOC before the DeltaNet tech got here at 10a. Made it just in time. We installed the new Bay Networks ARN router on our LAN down here (our first 100 Mb backbone!), but when we tried to bring up the frame circuit we just got dead air. So we called GTE, who had finished the install yesterday. So we thought. Turns out the circuit hadn't worked for them, and the GTE installer had gone home without sharing that fact with any of us. Anyway, we provided motivation to GTE and by 3:30 we had a live frame relay circuit. Still no joy connecting to DeltaNet, though. So after some phone calls, we find out that the circuit cuts through Pac Bell territory and Pac Bell hasn't done their thing yet. So at 5:10p we find the right Pac Bell tech and they say we'll be up in 10 minutes. I think he was buying time to run for the door. Anyway, it's 9:15p now and still no circuit, so I'm starting the 102 mile drive for home. I'll be back down here tomorrow trying to finish the install. 6/23/98 (B) There's never a dull moment around here. I get a call at 4pm from Scott Rosen, the admin I share a NOC with here in Pine Mountain Club. *All* of his servers have just crashed and rebooted. So we meet at the NOC, verify that all of his boxes did simultaneously reboot, and observe that none of RootsWeb's boxes went down. Since we have separate uninterruptible power supplies, we immediately suspect something went wrong with his. We run diagnostics, but everything is fine. Then we hear footsteps overhead. That is definitely *not* normal, because the NOC is on the top floor. Looking out the window, we realize the electricians are here installing the ducting for our new T1 connections. Following the new ducting down the wall, we realize they drilled through the wall and neatly into Scott's main power line. The resulting short and power glitch rebooted all his boxen. Bet it was pretty exciting for the guy running the drill, too. As I was saying, never a dull moment. At least it wasn't a condor roosting on the microwave antenna this time. 6/24/98 (B) The British Broadcasting Corporation has just brought down our main mail server. They've got something hopelessly buggered in their mail handling and it causes mail loops. I've removed the proximate cause of the mess, and I'm searching for any other list subscribers from that host. If I find them I'll kill them. ***************************************************************** TECH HUMOR: I once received a fax with a note on the bottom to fax the document back to the sender when I was finished with it, because he needed to keep it.