WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA (09/28/86)
Over the past three weeks, we have been able to receive mail from ARPANET hosts but not able to even establish connections, or when a connection has been eventually established, send mail and receive acknowledgements within rather generous timeouts to those same hosts. This one-way performance has also been observed in eventually established TELNET connections to various ARPANET hosts, where single-character echoes may take several *minutes* while continuous output, such as directory listings, appear normally. According to the NOC, this is a known problem which is being investigated. Could we have an intermediate report concerning the problem? Are only certain hosts involved? (Our most persistent and common problems have been with CSNET-RELAY and WISCVM due to the volume of mail they pass.) --Frank
sy.Ken@CU20B.COLUMBIA.EDU (Ken Rossman) (09/28/86)
Over the past three weeks, we have been able to receive mail from ARPANET hosts but not able to even establish connections, or when a connection has been eventually established, send mail and receive acknowledgements within rather generous timeouts to those same hosts... We're seeing much the same symptoms, though in reverse, and with FTP. We are able to make outbound connections to certain sites, but those sites get rejected for inbound connections to us. Got me baffled... -------
dave@RSCH.WISC.EDU (Dave Cohrs) (09/28/86)
There are a few reasons that WISCVM has been hard to reach. First, our gateway has recently been converted from an 11/34 to a VAX 750. The routes that have been generated since the conversion are not always very good (EGP problems). In the long run, the upgrade should be helpful; Wisc-Gateway passes between 0.75 and 1 million packets dayly. Second, there have been some PSN connectivity problems recently. One or two weeks ago, only one of our three neighboring PSNs was alive. Also, our PSN goes "not ready" (as seen by watching the lights on the LH/DH used to connect the gateway to the PSN) once every 20-30 seconds when the load gets high. This condition lasts for 1-2 seconds. This causes lots of packets to get backed up and/or lost. Third, the SMTP mailer on WISCVM has gone through some rough times. I think the version they are running now is stable. Finally, WISCVM is physically connected to our Proteon token ring. The number of errors on this net are extremely high. This seems to be a problem with inferior cables, and not with the Proteon ring itself. However, the old, bad cables are still in place, so the net still barfs constantly. The high error rate causes lots of broken and lost packets, not to mention the time wasted while the controllers try to regenerate lost tokens. Put all of this together, and WISCVM is a tough place to reach. dave