News - May 2003

May 31 2003 - We experienced problems with the incoming "uic.edu" mail servers beginning Friday night at approximately 8pm and continuing on and off until Saturday at 4pm. The problem caused these servers to sporadically reject many (but not all) incoming messages with destination addresses of the form: netid@uic.edu .

You may be hearing complaints about this from your correspondents who received such notices. They will have received a "rejection notice" from UIC with a message similar to these:

128.248.155.124 does not like recipient
Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown
Giving up on 128.248.155.124.

or

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
netid@uic.edu
(reason: 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown

If you were expecting an important message during either period, please ask the senders to re-transmit such messages to you.

The initial cause of the problem appears to have been a hardware failure, but the problem was compounded when reserve servers took over the load with an incorrect configuration. A fail-safe mechanism, for lack of a better word, "failed". We are reviewing the events and will take actions to prevent a recurrence in the future.

We regret inconveniences and problems caused by this problem.

May 17 2003 - Icarus will be down for more filesystem maintainance from 10am to 4pm on May 17.

May 14 2003 - Tigger will be down tonight (early Thursday morning) from 12:01am until 1:30 am for hardware repairs.

May 14 2003 - Wednesday May 14, the ADSM network backup server will be down starting at 11:00AM to upgrade the server software version. We hope to be done in an hour or so, but in case some hitch develops, we are reserving time until 4:00PM. The daily cycle of scheduled backups starts at 5:00PM. This is being done at mid-day because that is ADSM's quietest time; its busiest time is the evening, when it is backing up everybody's computers. It is currently running Version 4.2, and the upgrade will be to Version 5.1.

During the downtime, you will be unable to backup or restore files from your PC, or from tigger and icarus UNIX accounts via the dsmc command. All previously backed up files will be safe, and will be available for restore once again when the upgrade is complete and the server is back up and running.

May 10 2003 - Icarus will be down for brief filesystem maintenance starting at 10am tomorrow, Saturday May 10th. Icarus should be up again before noon.

May 09 2003 - Icarus will be down for brief filesystem maintenance starting at 10am tomorrow, Saturday May 10th. Icarus should be up again before noon.