mjohnson@Apple.COM (Mark B. Johnson) (05/17/91)
I tried to post the following last night, but it looks like it got bounced,
so here it is again with a little more information. This is an update of
ftp.apple.com. and system 7.
ftp.apple.com has been up and down for the last few days. We have added
a limiter (30 connections), but it is still having intermittent problems
which look like they are hardware related. I am headed back to Cupertino
at this moment to swap some hardware and replace a drive which appears to
have corrupted the FDHD images. We do not expect this machine to be back
online reliably until late this morning or early afternoon.
If you ask what takes so long, figure that we are
in the midst of our Developers' Conference, and when you stay up all night
working on the machine, you end up spending some daylight time sleeping. I
wish we could do better for you, but we are stretched to our limits at the
moment.
SO, look for ftp.apple.com to be back up by this afternoon, but I will post
a message to these newsgroups when we are sure it is up and stable (note that
I have not posted anything to this effect yet.) You should avoid apple.com
completely, as the content there is out of date and System 7.0 will not
be there at all. In fact, we are preparing to turn off the ftp access to
that machine completely as soon as ftp.apple.com is stable. (We are not
moving these files to apple.com since it is a production machine and we
cannot take the load ftp already has (prior to system 7). If the new Mac
and drive cannot handle the load, we will offload onto another machine.
Also please note that the FDHD images on ftp.apple.com appear to be corrupt
and must be replaced. Until I get them replaced, the directory will be locked.
I will also post a note when I have replaced these files. Do NOT assume that
they are okay if the directory does not happen to be locked (I have asked
someone else to lock it for me as I am offsite and cannot reach the machine
either at the moment).
So to quickly summarize:
1) Stay off Apple.apple.com, nothing is there and nothing will be put there.
2) ftp.apple.com does contain System 7.0, but is currently down.
3) I will post a message as soon as ftp.apple.com is back up and running.
4) If you get to ftp.apple.com before my message, do not download the FDHD
images (assuming you can get them) as they are currently corrupt. I will
post a note (and you will see new dates) as soon as I replace these files.
5) We apologize that this wasn't up reliably at 11 a.m. PST on Monday, but
that's just the way things go sometime. We are doing the best we can and
thank you for your patience.
6) If you can get the Upgrade kit from a dealer, please consider it. For the
price you get the manuals (not all of System 7.0 is intuitive) as well as
90 days of telephone support direct from Apple.
Thanks for your support and desire for System 7.0; we hope you find it worth
the wait.
--
Mark B. Johnson AppleLink: mjohnson
Developer Technical Support domain: mjohnson@Apple.com
Apple Computer, Inc. UUCP: {amdahl,decwrl,sun,unisoft}!apple!mjohnson
"You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?"
- Richard Bach, _One_mjohnson@APPLE.COM (05/23/91)
Just a short update on ftp.apple.com
The machine has been up and down, but its up time is starting to outlast
its down time. We are working around one annoying problem that is causing
the crashes and hope to have resolution soon. In the meantime, we are also
exploring other I/O and RAM options to throw as much CPU as we can at it.
We have now implemented the following (thanks to Erik Fair's dedicated nights):
A number-to-name lookup failure refusal, so if our ftp listener cannot resolve
your name from your IP number you will be refused a connection, and a limit of
one client per remote IP network, so if everyone from a single site decides
to hit us at once you fight it out against each other, instead of against the
rest of the network.
Fortunately, with these changes we have upped the maximum number of concurrent
sessions to 40 for the time being.
I should warn that we have also refused access to several sites who have been
hitting us with automated scripts every few minutes or on the hour. So if
you use an automated script to get on, get your stuff, and get off, great, but
don't keep hitting the machine over and over again or you risk the same fate.
We had to swap drives out two days ago after one bit the dust, so the normal
DTS sample code and the FDHD images which I had posted are being redone on the
new drive (thanks for your patience here).
Also note that the net install version should really only be used by larger
sites who need to upgrade multiple machines over a network. The disk images
should suffice for others. To clear the last bit of confusion, you need
DiskCopy 4.1 or 4.2 to convert the images to floppy disks and you can get this
in /ftp/dts/utils. Do NOT use MountImage to install from the disks, as the
results are NOT guaranteed.
In summary...
We are still working on the stability of the machine, so it is not yet up
and running without supervision. If you lose a connection, we apologize.
If you are a SCSI-2 hard disk/card vendor or a RAM vender with 4Mbit SIMMs
and want to help a worthy cause, let me know...
Thanks for your patience.
--
Mark B. Johnson AppleLink: mjohnson
Developer Technical Support domain: mjohnson@Apple.com
Apple Computer, Inc. UUCP: {amdahl,decwrl,sun,unisoft}!apple!mjohnson
"You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?"
- Richard Bach, _One_