Opus One Server Information Page

For All Support Questions

Email: [email protected]
Call: 520-623-3733
Mail: P.O. Box 3355, Tucson, Arizona 85722

Opus1.com is the server for Entertainment Magazine, its associated Web sites and its hosted Web sites.

System Operation

We have a fairly luxurious set of resources: 7.5 Mbits of external bandwidth, a moderate number of digital dial-in lines, over 100 Gbytes of disk storage, and a completely redundant network.

The Opus One computer room is designed so that no single failure will stop us. The building itself is served via diverse underground telecommunications carriers. If Qwest went totally off the air, we'd still be running. No single backhoe can take us down, because the conduits leave from different parts of the building and go in different directions.

Uninterruptible power systems are ready to take the load for up to an hour. An off-site generator can keep us going as long as we can put diesel in it. Our digital phone lines are backed up by an extra set of analog lines. If the entire T1 clocks at Qwest went crazy, you would still be able to dial in and monitor and manage things.

Our systems are constantly monitored by automated test systems. Should any system fail to respond, an automatic series of escalation procedures occur, starting with paging people and working up from there.

Every computing element is doubled. Using high-end clustering technology, we know that if any CPU, disk, controller, network card, hub, router, or bridge were to fail, things would automatically keep on going. And not with a "failover" interval---it's always hot, always clustered, always non-stop.

You may recognize some of the people who have come to us for advice: MCI. AT&T. Cisco Systems. The White House. The United Nations. Digital Equipment Corporation. Price Waterhouse. Apple. The California State Legislature. Deutsche Bank. Fidelity Investments. Genentech. The Swiss Stock Exchange. Johnson and Johnson. Honeywell. Raytheon. USAA. Kaiser-Permanente. NASA. Schlumberger. The World Bank. Xerox.

Networking

Special emphasis on building large networks. Our experience in TCP/IP, X.25, OSI protocols, and Digital DECnet goes back to 1980. We have worked in almost every network environment conceivable, ranging from the design and implementation of real-time protocols for traffic control to the migration of a 50,000 node network from DECnet to TCP/IP.

Electronic Mail

Especially "enterprise" electronic mail and groupware. Since 1985, Opus One consultants have installed dozens of corporate electronic mail networks, including ones designed to handle a million messages a day. Our experience, depth of understanding, and relationships with the major email vendors gives us a powerful set of tools for any email project.

Security

Particularly in networked environments. Although we are not cryptographers, we have an excellent grasp of the theory and practice behind contemporary security systems, and our experience with them stretches back to 1982. Our strength is in securing the network, and we have installed firewalls and conducted penetration tests around the world.

Databases

Especially data warehousing. Our consultants bring years of rich experience with them, not just at making your existing database go faster but at building responsive and useful database applications. Opus One's database expertise began in 1984, and our consultants have worked with all major products in the field. With strategic partnerships, we can offer system design and implementation from a single-user Microsoft Access database to a multi-gigabyte data warehousing and data mining system.

Internet

Opus One consultants were on the Internet before it was called the Internet, starting in 1981. We're not out to make a quick buck on the Internet craze by coding WWW pages. We help you maximize the value of your Internet connection by building in the support, the image, the security, and the reliability appropriate to your organization.

Opus One consultants are accustomed to working independently and with little supervision, as they bring a great deal of expertise to the table. If you'd like, you can hear a typical client describing project requirements to us.

About Opus One Server

Opus One was founded when the consulting company that Joel Snyder ran got a letter from a lawyer claiming that Joel's company name infringed on the rights of someone else who was already doing business under that name. That stirred things up. Joel had been consulting since 1981, but never as an organized company. The stakes were getting too high to just hang out a shingle and do consulting projects; something more formal was needed. Opus One, the corporate entity, was born.

Although he had worked with other consultants on several projects under the Opus One name, it wasn't until 1995 that Opus One got its second full-time helping hand in the form of Jan Trumbo. Together, Jan and Joel handle two-thirds of the consulting work of Opus One with five other part-time staff together handling the rest. Opus One has always had an Internet connection. Opus One has also always had a non-stop computing center. When the Internet market began to heat up, Opus One spun off its Internet Services into a separate entity and made them available to the Tucson community.=

Opus One Basic Settings

The following settings are generally needed for any dial-in user as part of your dialup networking (Windows) or remote access (Macintosh) settings. Some versions of some operating systems can leave the DNS servers blank; others require it. If you feel like experimenting, try leaving them out and see if it works. If not, then put them in.

Phone number: 918-0493
IP address: (leave blank; we will assign one each time you dial in)
DNS servers: 192.245.12.50 and 128.196.13.18
Host name: (put anything you want here, such as "computer")
Domain name: (use your domain name, such as "mycompany.com" or "opus1.com")

Opus One Application Settings

For your various Internet applications, such as email, you may want to use Opus One's servers (if you are sending and receiving mail through us, for example). The following may be helpful.

Mail server: mail.opus1.com
POP server: pop.opus1.com
IMAP server: imap.opus1.com
SMTP server: smtp.opus1.com
News server: Opus One does not currently support news reading from a local server

Notes on Electronic Mail

Opus One is very concerned about "spam," or unsolicited commercial email, and so we have made a number of enhancements to our mail server to both protect you and to make us good citizens in the Internet community.

Mail servers support two different forms of security, both of which are available on the Opus One mail servers. One is encryption, usually called "SSL" or "TLS," which ensures that no one can read your mail while you are uploading or downloading it.

The second is SMTP authentication, which ensures that only valid Opus One users can send mail through our servers. Mail encryption is available at all times, and we encourage you to use it if your mail client supports it. Even if you are dialed directly into Opus One, there is no harm in ensuring that your mail and your username/password are not passed "in the clear" at any time. Certainly if you are ever on the road or dialed into another ISP or use other broadband services such as wireless or cable modems, encryption is highly desirable. If you need help turning on encryption, please contact the vendor or your email package.

SMTP authentication is available at all times, and is required any time you are not on an Opus One network. SMTP authentication means that you must give a valid Opus One username and password any time you want to send mail through the Opus One mail servers. This ensures that you are an authorized user. A benefit of this is that you can continue to use Opus One's mail servers when travelling, even though you might be connected via some other ISP. Some mail packages, such as Netscape Communicator, will detect that Opus One supports

SMTP authentication and require you to enter a username and password to send mail, even if you are on the Opus One network. Others, such as Microsoft Outlook, will let you turn it on and off as you wish. There is generally no harm in leaving it turned on at all times. However, you will always have to use SMTP authentication when on non-Opus One networks.

Netscape Navigator Instructions

Here are some tips and tricks for setting up Netscape Navigator to use with Opus One. Before you start, you will need to know two things. One is your email address. This is always expressed with a fully qualified domain name. For example, "[email protected]" or "[email protected]."

The other is your mailbox name. This is just a single word, which may have numbers in it. It may or may not match your email address. For example, your mailbox name might be "rj" or "sovset123." You will also need to know your password, of course.

1.Open Netscape and go to Edit->Preferences. The "Mail & Newsgroups" menu is what you need. Click on the triangle to expand it if it's not expanded already.

2.Click on Identity Enter your own name (such as "Romeo Julieta") in the "Your name:" box, and your email address (such as "[email protected]") in the "Email address:" box. Everything else can be left blank (although you may want to come back and fill things in after you've gotten it working).

3.Click on Mail Servers. We're going to work on the "Outgoing Mail Server" part first. There are two possibilities. Either you are on an Opus One connected network (i.e., you are in Tucson and you have a direct line to Opus One, such as a DSL or T1 connection), or your are using some other ISP (cable modem, AOL, Earthlink, etc.). If you are on an Opus One network, follow the instructions in (4). If you are on some other ISP's network, follow the instructions in (5). If you roam between networks, use (5).

4. For Outgoing Mail Server (connected to Opus One networks). Enter "mail.opus1.com" in the "Outgoing mail (SMTP) server:" box. Enter your mailbox name (such as rj or sovset123) in the "Outgoing mail server user name:" box. For "Use Secure Socket Layer (SSL)...," select "Never." This will give you the best performance.

5. For Outgoing Mail Server (connected to other ISPs). Enter "mail.opus1.com:2525" in the "Outgoing mail (SMTP) server:" box. Don't forget the colon and 2525. Enter your mailbox name (such as rj or sovset123) in the "Outgoing mail server user name:" box. For "Use Secure Socket Layer (SSL)...," select "If Possible." This will give you the best security.

6. Now, we're going to add an Incoming Mail Server. If you have one in the list, click on it and delete it. Click "Add..." The server name should be "mail.opus1.com" and the server type should be "POP." The user name should be your Opus One mailbox name (such as rj or sovset123). If you want, select "Remember password." Do not check "Check for mail every ..." minutes. On the POP tab, it is very important that you do not check any boxes. 99.99% of our users are POP users. If you are an IMAP user (you would know this) then the steps are the same except you should select "IMAP" as the server type. The IMAP and Advanced tab defaults are fine, unless you are not on the Opus One network, in which case you should check "Use secure connection (SSL)" on the IMAP tab.

That's all you need to do. Netscape is fully set up to safely and securely read mail from your mailbox on Opus One.