In this month’s newsletter

1) CoSy moves to new hardware
2) Development Corner
3) Newsfeed Articles
4) ICUK turns 12

CoSy moves to new hardware

In October, we were pleased to complete the upgrade of the core CoSy Conferencing system to new CIX hardware. The new CIX hardware now runs Linux Ubuntu, ending 14 years of old Sun hardware. Previously, the old CIX sun box operated on a 5U server, with a manual backup process in place for fail-over.

The new CIX hardware is considerably faster, more reliable and is now part of an automatic real-time fail over cluster; so should one server fail, another can take over the load without the end customer noticing any downtime. Not to mention smaller and more energy efficient ;-).

Customers should notice speed improvements when connecting via an off-line reader, such as Ameol2, and the CIX Forums web interface and API applications.

As part of this upgrade, moderators will be pleased to hear they will be able to ban users from forums they control via CoSy as well as the web interface at http://forums.cix.co.uk/. A new edition of Ameol2 will be has been made available where moderators will be able to implement ‘Ban’ and ‘Unban’ directly.

This now means that none of the original hardware (which came to about four racks worth) acquired in the ICUK takeover in November 2011 is now in use today.

Development Corner

Work is progressing well on a new client-reader for CIX. We are planning on releasing this for beta testing, with alpha-testing already taking place behind the scenes. The idea of the new client will be to interact with the CIX API and CIX Forum systems, with a brand new easy to follow layout, especially aimed at new users who might not be familiar with the Ameol2 ‘offline’ mechanism. Our main development goals are speed, accessibility and keeping the design clutter free and many thanks to Steve Palmer for his continued work on the project.

As part of this development work, we have been looking at the CIX API and making some processes much faster and easier for potential developers to use in order to widen the features CIX can bring to other platforms, and we look forward to more releases and updates over the coming months.

Newsfeed

Don’t forget a few months ago, CIX added the ‘newsfeed’ feature to allow moderators to add external content feeds into forums. Examples of where this has been done successfully can be seen in cix:wendyg.public, cix:tech_news and, as a personal blog writer, at cix:wur. CIX’s own parent company, ICUK, has copies of its own blog posts replicated in cix:icuknet/newsfeed for customers to discuss and highlight articles posted by us.

It is a useful way for moderators to add additional traffic in their forums from external sources.

ICUK turns 12 

On November 8th, CIX’s parent company, ICUK, will turn 12. ICUK in 2013 launched many new products, especially aimed at its growing reseller platform. These include brand new leased line products at extremely competitive pricing, a brand new responsive-design control panel for cross-platform mobile support, a new invoicing and billing platform, a new range of powerful dedicated servers, and hardware upgrades across its broadband network.

In ICUK’s 13th year, we’re planning on more improvements for CIX, more hardware upgrades on the ICUK hosting platform with many more exciting development projects on the horizon.

As always, if you have any feedback for CIX, please post in the cix:cix.customer forum accordingly.

The CIX Team