mark (09/06/82)
We've had a rash of down hardware the past few weeks, and all hell has broken loose. Briefly, decvax has been down for several days due to moving pains (they moved their 780 and had a 730 covering during the move, but there were problems when they put the 780 back on) but appears to be up again. ucbvax was up and down (mostly down) for about 3 weeks because the 750 which is now ucbvax (if you don't have the new phone number for ucbvax - 8212 - you should have it try that number before any others, since that's a direct line into the 750, the others go over the ethernet from Ernie, the 780 that used to be called ucbvax) was suffering from various problems, including microcode bugs when the unibus is heavily used, attempting to heavily use rk07's, and the inevitible problems that happen when /usr/spool/uucp gets huge. ucbvax is back up but still having problems with a big spool directory. Also, cbosgd has been having dialer problems for several days and is unable to reliably dial out and sustain a conversation without getting hung up. This problem is not yet resolved. I propose we create net.news.downtime (does anyone have a sexier name?) to announce planned and unplanned downtime of machines, links, and in general things that will affect the net. In the planned case, the system administrator for a site can simply post from his/her machine. In the unplanned case, if the downtime is likely to last for more than a day, it's obviously not possible to post from the affected machine, so the announcement should be made from a neighboring machine. (Either a phone call can be placed to the neighbor asking them to post it, or the system administrator could use their guest login if they have one.) If the downtime cuts the net in two or more pieces (e.g. a major site which feeds a few local sites) multiple copies should be posted. Such postings would, of course, be optional, but encouraged, to avoid the inevitible rash of "what happened to site x?" or "why aren't we getting any arpanet net.unix-wizards news any more?" queries. Comments? Mark
woods@sri-unix (09/15/82)
I think its a great idea! I was WONDERING what the *`%#! happened to all
our news! Since 90% of our news comes through ucbvax, now I know! Not only
would a group like this keep many "where is our news" articles off the net, it
would also save the system administrators being bombarded with "where is our
news" questions from local users! Yea Mark!
GREG (ucbvax!menlo70!hao!woods or hplabs!hao!woods)