1.1 Welcome to Dairynet

Welcome to Dairynet, and welcome to ICE, premier server of the Dairynet collective.

Firstly, congratulations on being selected to have an ICE account. ICE sits free of charge on one of the UK's best ISP's backbones, which means you have access to a powerful machine offering a cornucopia of services. The range of facilities offered by ICE are unique. You could pay a lot of money to a commerical Internet company for some of the features offered by ICE, but very few will provide you the range of services and flexibility you get for free here - so with all this at your disposal, it really makes sense to get to know what's on offer and how to get the most out of it.

Here's a quick example of just some of the facilities you could make use of. You might want to memorise this list so that you can quote it next time you want to show off to you friends. There is also a full applications list if you're interested.

• A full telnet shell account - something that is not currently offered to the public as part of the dial-up services of any major UK ISP
• Your own virtual webserver, with full cgi access (scripts), access logs, server extensions, and pretty much no restrictions
• Advanced Email facilities, including mailboxes, mailing lists, subdomains, etc
• A full range of computer languages to try out, including Perl, C, C++, Scheme and BASIC
• You can download files from far corners of the Internet to ICE, from which you can download quickly to your PC
• Unlimited disk-space where justified - we have no quotas by default
• Multi-user Unix talk: chat to all your friends online
• Chat and play on ice's own MUD
• RealMedia (RealAudio and RealVideo) streaming available on request
• Full USENET newsfeed
• Because ice is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, you can tell it to do things for you while you're offline
• Run a full web-accessible SQL database with ICE's mySQL server
• Text-based web-browsing for speed and simplicity

But much more important than the access to the technology is the access to the Dairynet community, who are a multi-talented and helpful bunch - and this includes you, otherwise you wouldn't have been given an account. So when you feel your confidence and knowledge is up to scratch, please help others with our mentor scheme.

These pages were assembled by Nick and Jake with Andrew updating the site and server December 2000 (constituting the owners, managers, system administrators and support staff of Dairynet) and HTMLed by Tim (who is Dairynet's web design department). Links preceeded by a will take you off this site. Copyright©1998 Dairynet. All Rights Reserved.