News - Jun 2003

Jun 28 2003 - N O T I C E

Tigger will be down from 11:00am to 3:00pm Saturday June 28 to install software updates.

Jun 24 2003 - A massive influx of SPAM on Saturday caused some "maximum process" limits to be reached on both our DNS (bind/named) servers and our incoming "uic.edu" (sendmail) servers. After our first investigation on Saturday, we concluded that incoming mail had been delayed but not rejected outright.

Today, after scanning logs a second time, we discovered that a presumably small number of email messages were indeed rejected back to the sender with a message like this:

    554 mailin-1.priv.cc.uic.edu ESMTP not accepting messages

We have significantly raised the trouble-causing limits on the Sendmail and DNS servers to hopefully prevent this from occuring again.

Jun 12 2003 - ADSM is down Thursday June 12 from 11AM to 4PM to update the AIX operating system software, and to reconfigure its network connection for (hopefully) faster backups and restores.

This time slot was chosen because it is actually its quietest time of the day; it is very busy all night backing up everybody's computers.

Jun 12 2003 - We had an accident Thurs afternoon that caused mail delivery, bluestem, and a few other services to break temporarily. No mail was lost, but it queued up while we fixed the problem, and should all be delivered by now.

Jun 03 2003 - FYI Electrical workers in the BGRC computer room unintentionally disturbed a power connection, causing one of several banks of disk drives to power down. This was actually a worse scenario than having the entire system fail because long, detailed file system integrity checks had to be run instead of the usually quick commit/rollback log recovery. These checks consumed most of the 2.5 hours of downtime.