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GROUPBOARD/GROUPWORLD NEWSLETTER - December 2003

This is an occasional newsletter which is sent out to all registered Groupboard and GroupWorld.net customers a few times a year.

CONTENTS

Base license increased from 20 to 25 users for the same price
Change to width of drawing tools
Ethernet ADSL/Cable router bug causing timeouts
Linux gethostbyname() bug causing crash
NT create board bug
Groupboard Designer bug fixes
New version of Groupboard with audio/video conferencing and 3d chat

Base license increased from 20 to 25 users for the same price

We have increased the base number of users for the standalone server Groupboard license from 20 to 25 without any change in price. The current licensing structure is as follows (all prices in US dollars):

Groupboard:

Groupboard Designer:

Change to width of drawing tools

We have fixed a long-standing issue with the width of the drawing tools. Previously the difference in width between sizes 1 and 2 was much greater than between 2 and 3 (and subsequent sizes). We have now reduced the width of drawing sizes 2-10 so that there isn't as much of a jump between 1 and 2.

If you are running a hosted version from www.groupboard.com you can go back to the old version by setting the java codebase to "java.old" (or java_v3.old for Groupboard Designer). To use the old version in the gallery, just add "&java_version=java.old" to the url.

Ethernet ADSL/Cable router bug causing timeouts

There is a bug in some ADSL/Cable modem routers which causes timeouts if you are idle for more than 5 minutes. The problem only occurs in ethernet based routers which allow you to share an internet connection between more than one computer. Normally Groupboard will time out if you are idle for more than one hour. If you are getting timeouts more often than this then you will most likely need to check the setup for your ethernet router. The parameter that needs to be changed is "NAT timeout". If this is set to a low value such as 5 minutes then it will cause your internet connections to be killed after short periods of inactivity. You should set this value to something like 12 hours to avoid these problems.

Linux gethostbyname() bug causing crash

If you are using the Linux standalone server version of Groupboard and you have a recent version of glibc (RedHat 9.0 and possibly earlier), you will experience either crashes or errors on startup. This is due to the fact that the new version of glibc.a does now support backward compatibility with any earlier versions of the library if you use gethostbyname.

We have now rebuilt the Groupboard binaries dynamically and placed a new version on our ftp site:

ftp://ftp.groupboard.com/pub/groupboard-linux.tar.gz

NT create board bug

There was a bug in the NT standalone server version which caused errors when creating new boards if your license key was based on a hostname (rather than an IP address). This bug has now been fixed and a new version placed on our ftp site:

ftp://ftp.groupboard.com/pub/gbnt.zip
ftp://ftp.groupboard.com/pub/gbnt.exe (self-extracting)

Groupboard Designer bug fixes

We have recently released a new version of Groupboard Designer which has a number of bug fixes, including:

If you are running a version hosted from www.groupboard.com you will already have the updated version. If you are running a standalone server version you can download the new version from our ftp site.

New version of Groupboard with audio/video conferencing and 3d chat

We are working on a new version of Groupboard which will have features such as audio/video conferencing, application sharing, 3d chat as well as a programming language for developing collaborative applications. This version will be based on an activex control (for Windows) or a native executable (for Mac OSX and Linux). We are moving away from java for two reasons:

[1] Now that Microsoft doesn't ship java with their web browsers, the majority of users need to download it before they can access java based websites.
[2] It is impossible to do audio, video and 3d graphics in java without downloading and installing massive extra libraries. When using native code, we can do all of this "for free" with a single, small executable.

We intend to continue supporting the java based versions of Groupboard for customers who prefer to use them.



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