Tidewater.Net Helpdesk FAQ
Table of contents
1. Account Information
1.1 Can I change my password? How?
Call the local office at 563-9929, 763-9929 or 785-9929 and we'll be glad to help you with changing your password.
[top]1.2 Does Tidewater.Net offer local service outside of the midcoast Maine area?
Sorry, no, you must be a local call to 207-563-5010, 207-785-5010, or 207-763-5010 in order to use our modems without incurring long distance charges. You can, however, get your Tidewater.Net e-mail, browse our webpages or telnet and ftp to your Tidewater.Net account to maintain webpages through any other internet provider. You will be subject to any fees charged by your other provider in addition to your regular monthly fee for your Tidewater.Net account.
[top]1.3 How do I know how much time I've spent online?
Go to http://www.tidewater.net/hostonly/checktime.shtml. Type your username into the space provided and click the "Send Now" button. Your on-line time as of midnight the previous night will be e-mailed to you.
[top]1.4 What is my DNS address? What is a DNS, anyway?
Our DNS addresses are 12.27.189.1 for the primary and 12.127.16.67 for the secondary. The DNS or Domain Name System is a system that translates Internet names to Internet (IP) addresses. Our web server's Internet name is www.tidew ater.net, but it's IP address is 12.27.189.1 (yes, the web server is the same as the domain name server, we save space that way) Since most web pages are known by their name and not their IP address, it is important that your machine knows where to go to do this translation.
[top]1.5 OK, so what is my IP address?
You are given a different IP address out of pool of available IP addresses every time you login. If you would like to know what that address is for this login, go to printenv and look at REMOTE_ADDR. You may notice a number of other things about your self from this script - Note that this information is available to all web sites when you load one of their web pages. (Just in case you are a little paranoid!)
[top]2. Dialup Setup
2.1 What do I need to change on my Win95 computer when I switch from another service provider?
In general, you will need to change your dial-up configuration by creating a new dial-up icon and your e-mail setup in your current e-mail software. You may also want to change your homepage to point to our homepage at http://www.tidewater.net/ .
[top]2.2 How do I create a new Win95 dial-up icon?
When switching from one Internet service to another, certain information needs to be entered into Dial-Up Networking for the new service. The easiest way to do that is to create a new Dial-Up icon.
Double-click on My Computer on the desktop. The last icon in the My Computer window should be Dial-Up Networking. Double-click the icon and you should see at least one icon called Make New Connection. When you double-click that icon, you'll be prompted through a series of screens. In the first screen, you'll be asked to name the connection and tell which modem you wish to use. Type in a descriptive name, such as Coastal Telco Services, to customize the icon you are creating. There should already be a modem chosen for you and most people won't need to change that. If you have more than one modem installed, just click on the down arrow next to the default modem and choose the modem you want to use from the list.
Click on the Next button and you'll be asked for the phone number you need to dial to connect to the Internet service. Enter the number which is local to you from this list:
- Damariscotta Region: 563-5010
- Lincolnville Region: 763-5010
- Union Region: 785-5010
Click on Next and you'll be at the final screen, where all you need to do is click on Finish. A new icon bearing the name you entered earlier will appear in the Dial-Up Networking window.
Click once on the new icon to highlight it, go to the File menu and choose Properties. You'll see a new window with the name you gave earlier and several tabs in it. The current tab will be marked General. Somewhere on this screen, either as a tab at the top or as a button two-thirds of the way down, you'll see Server Types as a choice. Click on that. There will be a new screen with several choices. Type of Dial-Up Server should be set to PPP: Windows 95, Windows NT 3.5, Internet. Only the items Enable Software Compression and TCP/IP should have check marks next to them.
Click on the button marked TCP/IP Settings. This screen will deal with the actual network numbers your machine needs. The choice on the first section should remain at Server Assigned IP Address. In the second section choose Specify Name Server Address and enter the following numbers:
- Primary DNS: 207.3.226.1
- Secondary DNS: 204.70.57.242
Leave both WINS settings with zeroes in them. Make sure the last two items on this screen are checked and you're done. Click OK twice to return to the Dial-Up Networking window.
You can place a shortcut for this icon by dragging it onto the desktop. When you let go, Windows 95 will ask if you would like to make a shortcut. Click on Yes and you're done. Make sure you use your new icon when connecting to our service. Once you're sure everything is working satisfactorily, you can delete the dial-up icons for your old Internet service.
[top]2.3 What is the minimum computer hardware I need to get connect to the internet?
For a PC compatable, you need a minimum of a 386sx processor, 9600 baud modem, 120 meg hard drive (with 12-14 megs free), 8 megs system memory (DRAM) and Windows 3.x.This would be suficient to allow you install a small e-mail software package and a small web browser.
In order to get reasonable performance on the web browsing, we recommend a Pentium processor, 32 megs of system memory, a 2 gig hard drive, a 17 inch 16 bit color monitor (800X600), a 33,600 baud modem and Windows 95
.
For Mac users, we have seen Mac LC's on the net, but recomment you have a PowerMac with 16 megs of memory, a 33,600 baud modem, a 2 gig hard drive and MacOS version 7.5.5 or higher.
[top]You computer needs to know who you are before is will keep sensitive information like personal passwords. The easiest way to introduce yourself is to load the Microsoft Networking client and login with a blank password. This way, you become the default user and Windows will save passwords in your password cache.
To add the networking client open the Control Panel (Click "Start" then "Settings" then "Control Panel") then select the "Network" icon. When the "Network" dialog opens, click the "Add" button under the "Configuration" tab. The "Select Network Component Type" dialog will open, select "Client" then click "Add". When "Select Network Client" dialog opens, select "Microsoft" in the left side window and "Client for Microsoft N etworks" in the right side window then click "OK". You may be asked to insert you Win95 disk if some components aren't already loaded, then you may be told you have to identify your machine and workgroup. If so, select the "Identification" tab in the "Net work" dialog and fill in any blanks. What you put is the blanks does not matter as long as something is in the spaces.
You will probably be asked to restart you machine, and when it comes back up you will be presented with a login. Enter a username (this doesn't have to be your Tidewater.Net username) BUT DO NOT ENTER A PASSWORD! Make sure the password field is blank! You will be asked to confirm your password, just make sure the pasword fields are both blank and select "OK". If you enter a password in either window, you will be asked to login each time you start your Win95 machine.
If everything has been done correctly, you should be able to enter your login password one last time when you dialup and check the "Save password" box below your username and password on the "Connect To..." dialog and it will save it!
[top]3. E-mail Setup
3.1 How do I change my e-mail settings from my old service to my Tidewater.Net service?
Every e-mail package is different, but each requires similar basic information:
- POP3 or incoming mail server.
The POP3 server name is mail.tidewater.net - SMTP or outgoing mail server.
The SMTP server is smtp.tidewater.net - E-mail address.
Your e-mail address begins with the username you choose when you signed up, so if your username is chrisj then your e-mail address is chrisj@tidewater.net - Mail account username and password.
You gave us a username and password when you signed up, these are what you will use. Remember that these are case sensitive, the username is always in lowercase and password will be just as you gave it to us.
In Netscape mail, you will find the opti ons to change these under "Options", "Mail and News Preferences", "Servers".
In Internet Explorer Outlook Express, you will find thses under "Tools", "Accounts", and "Mail" tab. Select the " Add " button to create a new account setup or "Properties" to modify an old setup.
[top]3.2 Netscape is crashing when I access my e-mail, what's up with that?
Netscape E-mail in versions 3.x and below will crash if there is any corruption in mail folder file. On a Windows based machine, run scandisk and then compress your mail. To compress your mail, start Netscape Mail (click on the mail button or select the option under window) and look for the compress mail folders option under the File menu item.Netscape may also appear to "hang" at times. The most common cause of this is having a huge mail queue to downl oad. As long as the N graphic in the upper right hand corner continues to more, you should be patient and wait for your mail to finish downloading. Some large mail queues can take as long a 10 to 15 minutes to finish downloading. You can check the size of your mail queue by logging on to the mail server and listing the size of mail file. We have a Java Telnet applet that will let you logon here. See the instructions for deatils on checki ng your mail queue. [top]3.3 Can I get my AOL mail through Tidewater.Net ?
Yes, AOL has two options for accessing their services, one using the AOL software and your Tidewater.Net connection to use all of AOL's services and the other uses a Netscape plugin to access your AOL mail using your Tidewater.Net connect ion. For information on AOL NetMail got to http://www.aol.com/netmail/home.html.
[top]4. Homepage Setup
4.1 When I put up a homepage, what will my address be?
Your address will be http://www.tidewater.net/~myname where myname is your username at Tidewater.Net. Your first page should be called index.html.
[top]4.2 How is my web space laid out? How much space do I have?
You have 5 megabytes of file space available to you for web pages, sounds, graphics, cgi scripts, or other files. You root directory is at /home/username and we have created 3 subdirectories under that for executables in /home/myname/b in, webpages in /home/myname/www, and cgi scripts in /home/myname/www/cgi-bin. You can also create your own subdirectories as long as you keep the files you want to access from the web under your www/... directories.
The www/cgi-bin is a special case as far as web access in that you will not be able to reference web pages or graphics under this directory, only cgi scripts. You shouldn't have to mess with file permissions under the www subdirectory, we have set the file system up so just placing the files under that directory will give it the proper permissions to view it from the web.
You will have to set cgi scripts executable, but a mode of 700 will be sufficent. Because we use CGIWrap to cause cgi scri pts to execute with your permissions instead of the web servers permissions, you do not have to have group or public permissions set on your scripts.
[top]4.3 How do I password protect some of my pages?
You can password protect a subdirectory with the htaccess facility. Telnet to your Tidewater.Net account, create a subdirectory in www (let's call it secure) and place the pages you want to protect in that directory. Then create a file called .htaccess with the following lines in it:
AuthUserFile /home/username/www/secure/.htpasswd AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName My Secure Pages AuthType Basic<Limit GET POST> require valid-user </Limit>
Then we need to create a password file called .htpasswd in our root directory, /home/username. Make sure you do not put your password file in your web space. You can use the htpasswd utility to create the password file (type htpass wd at a command prompt for instructions). Add users to the file with htpasswd to allow others to see your pages.
[top]4.4 Can I have my own CGI scripts? How do I set them up and run them?
Yes, you can run CGI scripts by placing them in your /home/username/www/cgi-bin subdirectory and setting their file permissions to 700. Most script install instruction ask you to set file permissions to 755, but you don't need to do that at Tidewater.Net becuase we use CGIwrap. You can call your scripts with a URL like http://www.tidewater.net/~username/cgi-bin/scriptname. Our web server remaps that URL to http://www.tidewater.net/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/username/scriptname. You will not be able to server web pages from the cgi-bin directory and you should pay close attention on script setups because of the remapping mentioned above.
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